Overview and context

PacketUp was an educational project that I worked on during the course "User research, service design, and usability testing" during the period December 2020 to March 2021.

Stockholm Institute of Technology was contacted by PacketUp in the hope of collaborating with UX students and developing their website. My project group thus chose this project as the project description and issues sounded interesting and challenging.

Packet Up is (as of December 2020) a start-up warehouse and packaging company based in Lithuania. Their USP was that they through their strategically located warehouse in Lithuania have lower postage costs compared to other countries within the EU. With the CEO's background as an artist booker, the company turned primarily to bands and companies in the music industry and aims for a broader market.

The team

Our work team consisted of five UX students who all had PacketUp as their second case in total in the education, and we had never before worked together on projects. During the project, we agreed very well and worked in a fast and solution-oriented way where we all strived for the same participation and goals.

My role in the project was the same as for the others; overall UX design and UX research with the ambition to develop the website's structure and content and at the same time function within the framework that the course contained.

The challenge

Since PacketUp was relatively new to the market and did not see an increase in the customer base, they wondered why the customers did not show up.

Our mission was to focus on what characterizes trust in the service and then apply that feeling to the website in the form of layout, structure, and information architecture. The main goal was to create a confidence-inspiring impression, attract customers through the website and thus increase the customer base in a more self-sustaining way. How do you get potential customers to feel confident about the service through the website?

So the main question was:

"How do you get potential customers to feel confident about the service through the website?"

Understanding the user

We started the project by examining the target group's problems and needs, but also Packet Ups' competitive situation and were thus able to shed light on what we should focus on. It thus became the law for prioritization and decisions regarding design, continued work and sales to stakeholders.

We decided to start off with quantitative surveys in order to collect as much information as possible in order to be able to read patterns based on these. As the quantitative surveys did not yield any major results, we chose to change direction and instead focus on qualitative interviews to gather more data of value.

The qualitative interviews provided an understanding of the target group and its needs but also the competition around 3rd party logistics (3pl). Questions were asked about what customers prioritize and wish out of service and it appeared that customers prioritize relatively evenly in terms of shipping, delivery, and security.

Customers also prefer a familiar and personal approach, with a clear information structure and a desire for one interface solution with an order overview. We started analyzing the qualitative raw data and to give it life, we first chose to turn it into a persona. Furthermore, we created a swim lane to understand the structure around PacketUp, and to start generating ideas we formulated the problem statements:

• The customer needs to feel a high level of trust in the service to dare to send their goods to a warehouse in Lithuania.
• Many questions customers ask themselves do not exist on the website at present. The information design is lacking both format and content.
• The communication between customer and Packet Up needs to be optimized, and here is our task to find out the type of information that is important to the customer.

Synthesizing the material

When we compiled the user surveys, we first created a persona. Furthermore, we created a so-called "effect map", where we prioritized the users' needs. We could clearly see that potential customers mainly wanted to know:

• How the service works.
• If the service was real and not a scam.
• How much you save on the service.

Furthermore, we divided the needs into different sub-categories and ranked them according to the statistics. The result landed in three effect goals. Within three months of the service being implemented:

• The customers will start looking for PacketUp instead of the other way around.
• A higher percentage of website visitors will contact the company.

Ideating solutions

We then got into brainstorming we used "How can we" as our main method. Here we asked ourselves the question:

"Through information design, how might we increase confidence in PacketUp so that the customers choose us and thereby increase the customer base?"

The process gave us two main directions:

• Idea # 1: Showcase a visual customer journey so that customers can clearly see how the service works.
• Idea # 2: Clearly show costs and what the customer earns from the service

After "how might we", the goal was to create an as intuitive and easily oriented website as possible with an information order and content that resonates with the customer's needs. The customer must quickly understand what the service is about and feel confident in the site.

Validating design concepts and lo-fi prototype

We then performed user tests on the landing page, we used "card sorting". Here the goal was to explore which sections of information the users wanted and in which order these would follow.

We saw here that users preferred to first know what the service is about and how it would work to use the service. This is presented on the website through a short introduction to the service and then a customer journey is presented under the heading "How it works" which later became "This is how we help you save space, time, and money".

After, users wanted to see price information and what is included in the service, reference to customers, information about the founders/employees of the company, and finally a library of FAQ so that the user can independently find out the desired information about the service.

Visual design

After discussion with the stakeholders, the UX team developed a mood board to provide a basis for the design of the website. The focus was on creating a balance between packaging elements as well as music exports, which are currently the company's main areas. Color and font are developed for the purpose of creating an edge to the side while it must not appear too scary or nasty.

I later developed my own graphic design for the project after further discussion with the stakeholders. The goal was to create a color theme with yellow, white and black. This is the design shown in the header above.

Results and impacts

PacketUp will focus on clear price information and structure. They need to build on their credibility and how it should be communicated as well as better navigation on the page.

Our main recommendations to our stakeholders were to be clear with important information that is valuable to a potential customer. It should be easy to understand what costs apply and on so avoid unexpected/hidden costs. We also judged that reviews from customers should contain links to the customer's website in order to increase trust and the website's reliability.

The stakeholders were very pleased with the team's efforts. They were pleasantly surprised despite our little experience thinking that this was a school project. This was self-confident and very developing for me as a designer and I will bring the new lessons and insights to the next project!

Learnings

PacketUp as a project gave me a completely new view of UX and a good overview of what a sharp project can look like. I have gained a better understanding of how the Design thinking process works as a whole and how I can apply it in future projects. I have gained a broader knowledge in user research, service design, and user testing and I have developed skills on how to:

• Understand users
• Define problems
• Use interview technique
• Create visual tools such as persona, mindmap, effect map, and user journeys
• Create a better information architecture
• Prototype
• Conduct user tests
• Write design documents
• Think about availability at an early stage and locate issues in WCAG

I have also realized the great value of regularly keeping in touch with the customer and making sure to work towards their goals and needs. In the end, I am satisfied with our efforts, although I believe that we should have worked more with certain aspects, especially to analyze and contact our target group, which in times around the coronavirus was very difficult to find.

In conclusion, this has been a very fun project with many lessons and I want to thank everyone involved, and I want to send a special thank you to our fantastic teacher Ulf, who made our most difficult moments brighter!