storr – Paavan Patel

Overview

Goal: Find & test new value prop.

Time: 1 week

Team: CX, UX (myself), and PM...but kinda everyone

What: Clickable prototype for mobile web

Some of the team

Context

Original product intention was to create a world where people buy from people, instead of traditional, impersonal channels such as big-box retail stores. By eliminating customer acquisition costs (CAC), brands would pay users for sharing products that led to sales.

Users were on-boarding, creating stores, adding products, writing comments and sharing stores. 👍

Virtually no sales. Nor were users sharing the app. 👎

Research: User interviews

Luckily we had already implemented weekly (whenever possible) user interviews and we had some great interview notes. These were conducted by CX and myself. We heard:

It feels “icky” selling to friends
Average price point was too high
Sharing the app was perceived as increasing competition

*Participants were all sellers. We knew this was an issue and tried very hard to find users or our target demo to speak to. We needed to hear from the buyers.

Research: External data

Pulling as many retail reports as we could find, we heard Gen-Z say they care about social causes.

Take-aways:

The growth strategy wasn't working.
Can’t wait for BD to add every brand under the sun.
We may not be able to convince BD to abandon their cool, premium-brands first approach.
Given that our existing product already had a social-cause element, we felt perhaps it wasn't clear enough.

Brainstorm

As a team, we generated many ideas and talked about all of our assumptions. As crazy as it sounds, maybe money wasn't motivation enough. This was the first time as a company we challenged this core assumption.

Design exploration

I referenced as many other sites as I could find that linked their products to a social cause for inspiration. Here are a few variations I explored.

Dynamic GIF based on which option the user selected. Intended to delight the user.

Testing: Setup

10 participants in total. All testing was performed remotely. We wanted to understand how easy the experience was to use so we had users compare our site with a few others in the space. They were asked to speak to the perceived benefits of our site in contrast with the others, In addition, users were asked to perform basic actions like:

find a product
add to cart
checkout
share their purchase + social impact

Learnings

Users were delighted by the fun messages for deciding how to share their earnings!
When asked about the broadcasted purchases (which no one mentioned as the main benefit), users said they were unlikely to share purchases on social media platforms, saying they were more likely to share on Storr. A couple of users mentioned they would be uncomfortable sharing the fact they bought $500 shoes and that platforms like Instagram are more about “personal content”.
Those who recognized the ability to choose where some money goes, all drew a comparison to Everlane’s “choose your own price”.
Everyone else felt it was complicated, didn’t understand where the money was coming from and why 3 parties were involved.
Given that ethically sourced products cost more to produce, going that route while sticking to our target demographic would have pushed the average price-point even higher. Gen-Zers aren't able to pay more for ethically produced products, despite them telling us that's what they're looking for.

Next steps

We recommended abandoning Gen-Z and switch to groups with disposable income. Furthermore, to look for groups where product recommendations are important. For these reasons, we felt that new moms would be a perfect fit. We joined sub-Reddit groups to find participants for the next round of testing while we started to plan the next prototype. Additionally, we identified a popular new mom blogger, who was excited about a site for new moms built on a community. She was enthusiastic to share what we were working on with her users. We were ready to create a feedback loop and try again.