User Surveys

We conducted a social media survey to gain quantitative data on donating and op shop shopping behaviors. Although Reddit yielded no responses, we got 19 responses in total. Participants donated clothing and money and cited helping those less fortunate and decluttering as reasons for donating. Op shop shoppers mostly made budget-friendly, casual purchases. Vinnies was the most popular charity store among participants. While online charity stores were not utilised by any of the participants.

Insightful Interviews

To gain a deeper understanding of people's experiences and behaviors related to donating and shopping at thrift stores, it was necessary to gather information directly from them. Therefore, each of us in the team interviewed staff, shoppers and donors in charity stores such as Vinnies, Salvos and Lifeline, and acquaintances via Zoom.

Talking to people in charity stores has been an eye-opening experience for me. It was my first time visiting op shops and I have to say my view on them has completely changed for the best.  It was great to see how friendly and passionate the staff at Vinnies and Salvos are and how particular they are when it comes to the quality of the goods they receive in the stores. It was also very interesting to hear people's reasons first hand for shopping in and donating to such stores. I have gathered a lot of information on the what, why, when, where and how people donate and shop in op shops. 

It was time to head back to the team and discuss our findings. 

We spoke to 50 people in total and generated 500 insights from these interviews. These are some of the insights from the main trends we observed in our Affinity map:

Who is Our Main Focus?

Keeping the main trends in mind from our Affinity map and looking at our Empathy map we could formulate the main behaviours, pain points, core needs and main goals our users would have. We saw that most people we spoke to expressed they go to op shops to find unique items and that they spend a lot of time looking for these items. Hence we decided this was the most impactful to the user and Vinnies. Of course at this stage we did not know what our final solution would look like but we could imagine ideating on the users wanting to find unique clothing to express their personal style.

Ada's Journey

To visualise how Ada currently shops in Vinnies we mapped the following sceniario she would be in. During her lunch break, Ada decides to visit Vinnies and search for some clothes that suit her personal style. We considered the actions she would take and her emotional states at each stage. 

Another sketch-idea of having a  low-fee monthly subscription  was promising because it could provide a steady stream of revenue for Vinnies while could deepen the loyalty of current and new customers and it would be feasible to set up.

We also revisited another sketch idea of making reservations on the site but going to the store to actually buy the item. This averts the need for an ecommerce site, making it more feasible to Vinnies and allows the user to get a piece of mind on what and where they can find their unique items.

So overall the subscription would include early-access notification of items while being able to reserve this item amongst other items of the user's personal style. A curated list of items would be created via a personalisation onboarding when first opening the website.

Task Analysis

To understand what features we would need and how we would sketch out a wireflow we visualised how Ada would go through the digital platform, completing the task at hand.

Feature Prioritisation

Going from the ideation sketches, to drawing our a task flow we considered various features we could have in our prototype. We knew that our main features would be able to to subscribe, have an onboarding that curates a list of items for the user, enter email to get notified of new items later on and to be able to reserve items. besides these features we considered alternative features to our main ones, such as sms notification, and also commonly seen features such as "donate money online" which we saw on direct competitors website.

Paper Prototype

Putting the Lo-fi to the Test

We each conducted 1-on-1  usability tests on our low-fidelity prototype. We used Marvel to allow the users to go through the wireflow once we gave them the scenario. Our goal was to assess how successful the users are in completing the task of subscribing and reserving an item of their style and from their preferred store locations. 

Mid-fi

Thereafter, for the Mid-fidelity prototype we decided to find a way to showcase the perks of the Subscription plan more clearly and to move the payment and subscription to later, once a user wishes to reserve an item.

OKRs to Measure Results

In order to measure the impact to Vinnies our team came up with 3 quantitative measurable goals for the first year after launching Vinnies Insider. These OKRs would allow the measure of interest, the sales and customer loyalty.

We have researched & ideated to then prototype a solution we see as a fit for Vinnies goals of increasing sales and interest, while bringing awareness to sustainability. Our mobile-responsive website provides a VIP shopping experience where the in-store shopping experience remains but the convenience in finding desired items is improved. 

Where could we improve our processes next time?

• Double-check and quality-check all insights before starting the affinity map. We had to rewrite a lot of insights once we were way into mapping. Having clear, concise and insightful Post-its makes mapping way easier!

• Spend less time perfecting the HiFi and focus on the final presentation! It was a rush to prepare for the presentation which could have been avoided by strictly keeping to schedule at the very end as well, like we did during the project.