Locale
Social media is a key aspect for business growth for companies of any size and from any industry. 71% of small businesses are on social media but only 53% are actively using social media and fewer use it effectively. Small businesses take a while to adopt social media platforms and use them effectively for their business needs causing them to miss out on product sales, buzz, shareability, and expanding their customer base.
Project Overview
Project Duration
Ten weeks
Team Members
Angela Martin, Dylan Jackson, Dane Galbraith
My Role
UX Design, Visual Design
The Problem
Small businesses are slow to adopt social media and are not keeping up with the market. As a result, they’re missing out on the product sales, buzz, and expanded community.
The Solution
Locale is an outreach solution that allows small business owners to spread the word about their business to their local community, through every corner of the web.
Major Features
01
Easy Setup
Quick and simple onboarding.
02
Customized Feeds
Your style, your way. Totally personalized.
03
Post Analytics
Know how each post is doing and how to improve.
04
Platform Compatibility
Post to multiple social media platforms at once.
05
Camera Assistance
Take a great photo every time with easy coaching.
06
Collaboration
Share with multiple employees to work together.
Process
We started our project by doing some secondary research. We looked at 22 secondary research articles which produced a large portion of our 182 insights for affinity mapping later on. We were able to find four main problems with the secondary research. We also set our target audience with the research that we did.
01
02
Local businesses are isolated.
They’re technologically outdated.
Local businesses still exist in a “word of mouth” public relations system and often don’t hold much footing in the greater retail world.
Sometimes it’s by choice, and other times business owners don’t have the new methods readily available to them or the funds to afford new systems.
03
04
There’s no easy way to shop locally online.
Competing with big corporations.
We love to browse online and shop in-person. How can we connect the natural flows of product search within the local community?
Big companies are still here and continue to dominate the economic and social forefront of shopping.
We did some competitive analysis to see if there were any other products or services that solves the problem that we were looking into.
We went on to our next step which was primary research. We were able to do some surveys, user interviews, expert interviews, and user observations. We got 182 data points from the research that we did, and we did affinity mapping to organize the data, and below are our key insights that we've gathered.
With all the insights and data we have gathered, we created two personas and their user journey maps. So that we can gain a perspective similar to the user's, and find out different needs and expectations that users have.
Ideation
We were able to come up with the How Might We with the personas and the user journey maps that we had.
How Might We
...show current stock, predicted stock and prices to customers in real time?
...track inventory levels to provide accurate data to the consumer?
...create a chain reaction of local shoppers?
...simplify the process of buying from an online small business store?
...convey personalities of small businesses into a digital platform?
...simplify the process of setting up an online store?
Prototype & User Testing
With all the work that we have done, we were able to create some prototypes of our solution. We started with some paper prototypes, and we went to our target users to conduct some user testing.
Wireframes & Renderings
What I learned!
I learned not to settle with the first idea that you have in your mind. My teammates and I spent a lot of time brain storming for an idea that we thought would work for both the users and the local shops. After some more research, and user testings, we found a better solution, which was Locale. A good solution will come if you keep looking for one, so you have to trust the process and keep going!
