How the psychological phenomena of sneakerfreaks affects the global footwear industry
Come see how I made an app for sneakerfreaks and sneakerfreaks only
Background
My Role - Product Designer, UX Researcher
Timeline - 8 weeks
Tools - Figma
Deliverables - Secondary Research, Persona, Sketching, High-fidelity Mockups, Prototyping, User Testing, Next Steps Outline
Process - Design Thinking
Sneaker freaks are influencing the global footwear industry. They buy and sell branded sneakers on a massive scale, yet there is no single app that keeps track of their sneaker portfolio in one place. As the sole designer of the project, I sought to solve the issue by allowing users to seamlessly buy and sell products while keeping track of their current sneaker portfolio.
Will a sneaker portfolio help sneaker freaks buy and sell more shoes? Read on to find out!
42% of users felt interrupted when exploring products.
Juan the VC investor
Meet Juan
A VC investor living in Manhattan, New York, whose biggest fear is buying high and selling low. However, his current platform is missing key features to successfully manage his current concerns.
How might we make Juan feel confident with the timing of when to buy or sell his sneakers?
Intuitive AI detection flow
While finalizing the high-fidelity mockup, I realized that my "room view" collection tool was not intuitive enough. As a result, I came up with this AI detection tool that uses a camera to recognize a pair of shoes and identify the brand, year, quality, etc. It then recommends the price based on the findings, while the user can decide whether to apply the price and enable the product’s listing on the marketplace.
Room view added
List views are boring - they are everywhere! Rather than enumerating the items that Juan owns in a plain list view, the 3D view of the items he currently owns gives him a complete overview of what he owns in one place.
Moodboard updated
My initial approach to the HypeKiss mood board was a bit dreamy, pastel, and utopian. However, based on feedback from mentors and users, I revised my main color scheme and the mood board to reflect their opinions.
Now it is time to introduce… (drumroll please…🥁🥁🥁)
HypeKiss
An all-in-one app that lets Juan seamlessly put his sneakers on the marketplace,
buy verified sneakers from other sellers and manage his shoe portfolio.
So what did Juan think of the app?
In total, ten participants like Juan were recruited, and below are the key takeaways leading to the final iteration:
Give users options
At first, the only way to add new sneakers was to upload them from the user’s photo album. New options, like taking a photo or video, searching the web, or an email, were added to give Juan more options to update his sneaker portfolio.
A whole new starting page
In general, Juan was not impressed with our first loading page. It was too...all over the place. In this new version, a modern, technically scalable, AI-powered starting page greets Juan, and it has been met with a lot of positive feedback.
Next steps
Refine UI guideline
Conduct more usability testings
What did I learn from this project?
Ultimately, the notification flow, where Juan is notified when the value of his items significantly changes, came out fairly successfully. However, the flow where the AI recognizes the item, recommends the price, and lets Juan upload the item to the marketplace could be improved in its usability.
More research could be done for the actual marketplace flow, as it only contains the basic common flow, nothing special compared to other apps.
It was my first UX/UI research project, and I feel proud of myself for conducting end-to-end project by myself.
Second iteration of high-fidelity wireframe
“When is the actual app going to launch?”
I'd love to learn how you think about the process and chat with you! Hit me up! :)
