In mid-2021, Intuit held a company-wide incentive called Innovation Week, where we were given an opportunity to speak with customers, define a problem statement, and provide a solution - all within one week.
As Trada grew, our loyal customers started to experience content fatigue - they were seeing the same products all the time.
In mid-2021, Intuit held a company-wide incentive called Innovation Week, where we were given an opportunity to speak with customers, define a problem statement, and provide a solution - all within one week.
Trada is an online wholesale marketplace that helps independent retailers purchase unique merchandise from local craft brands and makers. Read about how I helped build and design Trada from the beginning.
I teamed up with my coworker Shekhar (co-founder and Product Manager of Trada) and Celena (Product Designer). My responsibilities include:
We started with a broad goal of improving the product discovery experience on Trada to increase the checkout rate.
Even though visitors are browsing Trada, only few would add products to cart and even fewer would check out. Out of all the visitors to the retailer homepage, 73% viewed a product page and only 42% added products to cart and 27% checked out their cart.
We first interviewed four customers and asked them broad questions:
Through the first four series of interview, we noticed four recurring themes that could indicate friction in product discovery or buying experiences in Trada.
While most customers in the first four series of interviews agreed that Trada is the most convenient place to purchase, the actual share of wallet owned by Trada varied widely - from 10% to 100%.
We also noticed that all of the retailers stated that they come to Trada not just to buy, but also to browse and get inspired (once a week to daily). However, many felt they had seen everything on Trada as they keep seeing the same thing again and again.
We decided on go narrow on this problem: To inspire retailers to find new collections and help them zero-in on their next bestseller.
Next, we wanted to test a prototype in front of our users. Trada relies heavily on the look and feel of the website, so we skipped wireframing and went straight to high fidelity designs. As I have created a design system for Trada in Figma, it didn't take long to churn out high fidelity prototypes.
We spoke with 9 more customers for this purpose. In total, we spoke with 13 customers in 45-60 minutes interviews.
The prototype above shows the landing page for retailer, after the first page they see after logging in to Trada. A few things to highlight from this prototype:
We also worked on the categories page, which is the page they see when they click into any categories on Trada. A few things to highlight from this prototype:
To support the top section where we are showing categories on the coursell, we needed to know which category caught the attention of our user. We showed 8 different categories to users and asked the first 3 categories that they would click on.
We researched each brand before the interview and manually put in relevant categories / location based on each brand, so that it felt more real to them. We also shuffled the cards with each interview to ensure the result is fair.
After testing the prototype in front of 6 users, we learned that: