Online hyper local personal styling community marketplace for personal and interior styling needs
Jan 2014 - Nov 2014
Our main challenge is to connect fashion stylists, merchants and buyers on a single platform.
This helps stylists to find more clients, merchants to sell products and buyers to buy the items they want.
In late 2013 Kunal approached me with an idea of a shopping app. He wants to make a social discovery app to make shopping smarter. But through the development process it transformed into a full-fledged product platform.
In the beginning of 2014, we scrapped everything we made and start over. If we really want the product to get shaped, we need to concentrate fully on this. it’s a kind of risk having very limited resources and a tiny team. Being my first startup experience; jumping into this world though is a risky decision but is also a great experience.
We really don’t know whether we got succeeded or not. But if we really want to deliver this; then have to step further. So I pull up my sleeves and dive deep into the product.
We sat down and start asking some questions to ourselves:
Our product revolves around 3 stakeholders. We created personas for all of them to have a broad idea about our possible users:
Each feature involves the tasks which a user is going to perform. I Note down the possible tasks for all the respective user features. There are also sub-takes and inter-personal tasks involved.
Based on all the information we have for each user; I started creating possible interaction flows/wireframes. This process involves a lot of iterations and we try multiple possible solutions of the same problem. I created end-to-end flow for each feature. I try to make the steps simple and easy to use; providing possible information to get the work done.
Once all the documentation process gets over, now starts the actual designing. Before getting into the whole design process; I made the branding part. Like what color should be used? What font will look good? How the logo should be? I tried and tested several options for this and settle on the following:
While designing the screens; I felt that if we want to extend the product and want to iterate further and faster, then need to think in a different way. So we implemented the modular design approach. Being a tiny team, limited resources and I am doing all the interaction/design/dev part; we used lean and mean approach for the whole stuff.
I started with pencil-n-paper to wireframe the design or any interaction flow. Once we settle on something; I look upon to see if any new components needs to design or we can use the existing one. If it’s already present; I skip the design process and directly start the prototype with html/css/js. We then just plug-n-play the components to see multiple versions of the same page whenever necessary. This helps us to same on some time, iterate faster and try and test different approaches of the same problem.
Similarly we tested the possible solutions with some of our early adopters. We take their feedback into account and refine it. All of the screens go through the same process before actually coming to shape.
Stylists able to sell their items through the shop.
If someone finds something useful, he can store it into my finds.
Trunk shows created for users to help them ease the fashion decisions.
Upload the products and show your skills to the world.
Add products to your trunk show and create a perfect look for user.
Explore products from other sellers through various categories.
Add entire catalogue to an event which your are creating.
Earn some comission for each product sold through your trunk show.
The home of seller. He can add/sell/promote his products via My shop.
By adding a few required details; a seller can create the shop.
Seller can drag and drop a bunch of products to upload
Add some basic details of your product and it's ready to sell now!
Each product has all the required details based on it's category. Anybody can buy the product from here itself.
The detailed view of a folder in a seller's shop. All the available products along with some basic info are shown here.
Any buyer buys products from here. It's the 1st step in a 3 step process.
The last step in the buying process; add required card details to buy.
A detailed report of your purchaed items. All the purchased items can be tracked.
The usual settings for any user. Differs based on user criteria.
The community which we are targeting is kind of mixed bunch. We want to make sure that users should not get any issues while interacting with the product. So to ease the onboarding we tried several things to get this going. Some of them are:
Once everything is in place, it’s now time to launch our main site. We tried hard to get users understand the concept through home pages. Users should easily come to know what the product is all about.
Starting with a very simple one, we keep refining the home pages to a stage where everybody should quickly see what they are looking for and start signing in.
We are about to launch the product. We want to make sure that we should able to communicate with the users once they sign up with emails. So we come up with a chart where all the possible tyes of communication messages listed along with the emails. This helps us to know when to send which mail.
In sync with the chart; I created the possible email templates for each type. I created a basic structure of the mail. A welcome message, some info about the communication and the required user action. Once the structure is ready; we can send multiple mails as per the message.