_blaenk mobile app
Ecommerce start-up
Role | Product Designer
Team | 2 Engineers, 1 Product Designer
Background
blaenk is a 3rd party placement physical marketplace for health & wellbeing products, where products that are curated ensure both usability and appeal. With its product placement, _blaenk aims to increase D2C traffic in a higher quality.
When I joined the team, _blaenk already had a website and a physical store in Cologne to display its product portfolio. Having a strong offline presence in center of Cologne, _blaenk wanted to have a mobile app for offering its product portfolio to customers.That’s where I ended up working on.
Initial Sketches
Problem
First step was to do discovery research. We found out, from people who were coming into the physical store, that offering a narrowed down selection, simply put, selected products from the market was an appeal to the customers. Our discovery interviews showed that not being overwhelmed by the amount of choices was a big attraction to the user.
However, even if we offered a selection of high quality health&wellbeing products, most of our products were already being sold on other e-commerce websites. Why would anyone buy, let’s say, the same pillow through _blaenk but not Amazon? What would make _blaenk standout and gain users?
Wireframing
Conceptualization
Having a physical store as a startup meant we already had the customers who were interested in _blaenk, they were the ones coming into the store. We observed store customer’s shopping behaviour to find out opportunities, also to create user personas. The product discovery interviews showed one thing that shined; customers loved product demonstrations.
_blaenk had the advantage of being able to offer product trials to customers due to having a physical store. However, what would that potential mean for the mobile app? After analysing the current trends on online shopping behaviour, the answer was clear: demonstration meant video content in online world.
Once this was settled down with the team, I took two decisions two conceptualise this idea:
Use an already learned structure for the video content display (ex:TikTok)
Add the skeleton of a shopping app.
Final Designs
Testing & Solution
With already decided pillars of the app like product pages and customer profile, product discovery experience was integrated as the main task of the user. The next stop was to push pixels.
The app’s structure was based on product video discovery by swiping and users could purchase the product on 3rd party websites. If the user wishes to test the product, they can also see the store location and availability of the selected product.
I iterated the design and then made a polished prototype with Figma. The app was tested in store with existing customers of _blaenk and changes were made based on the feedback, to be released to the App Store for the first version.
Please reach out to me to view my full portfolio.