Foxy: Quick and Clever Shipping
From concept, to research, to design, to development. In an open design challenge, my team and I had an opportunity to create a business and website from start to finish.
CONCEPT
My team and I began by brainstorming issues we wanted to solve. Seeing small businesses we loved struggle during the pandemic, we thought: what if we could bring the convenience of Amazon shipping and checkout to small businesses?
So our idea took flight. We would create a company that encouraged people to shop locally by offering some of the same conveniences as corporate e-commerce brands.
RESEARCH
My team conducted five user interviews and developed a survey, which got 49 responses. We found that many people shopped at Amazon out of convenience, but a vast majority of our respondents would have preferred to shop small-businesses over corporate chains. This confirmed our hypothesis that, given the choice, most people would frequently shop online at small businesses if they offered some of the same services as large ones like Amazon.
This research gave us a good backing for the direction of our product, and made us think about the aspects of online shopping we hadn’t thought of. For example: had the pandemic changed people’s shopping habits? How do we make these small businesses better known in their communities? How can we lower our carbon footprint by making a purely local product?
Our first step after completing our research was to form our idea. We began with one user persona, Muriel, who represented the consumer who would be shopping at an online retailer. Our initial idea for the company was to compile local businesses onto one retail space that could be shopped through. But as we were iterating on this idea, we noticed that our idea left out a very important part of this transaction: the small businesses themselves.
With this realization, we created a second user persona—this time, a small business owner named Donna. Realizing that we could serve both small business owners and shoppers equally, we shifted our idea to create a company that both provided for the needs of consumers with convenient and fast shipping, and also gave small business owners more of an online presence.
Our goal was the same, but we shifted how we would accomplish it. Shoppers who signed up with Foxy would have their shipping information and payment methods saved. Businesses who chose to implement Foxy would be featured on our website, and would get access to our Foxy shipping methods (bike delivery, two day shipping, and packaging materials provided).
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Amazon is a corporate behemoth that offers many goods and services their customers have grown to rely on. This makes it challenging for small businesses to compete in the online marketplace. Customers shop at Amazon for convenience and out of necessity because their needs are fulfilled quickly and easily, even when local retailers might offer the same solutions closer by.
How might we create a solution for small businesses to ship products quickly and store payment information securely in order to sell their products easily and make shopping locally as accessible as shopping at Amazon?
VALUE PROPOSITION
Foxy enables small businesses to compete with Amazon more effectively by using the collective power of multiple businesses. Foxy offers solutions for fast, local delivery and simplified payment processes to meet the needs of consumers who have grown to rely upon first class service from the world’s most successful e-commerce brand.
To keep up with the needs of environmentally conscious customers, Foxy offers an ultra “Go Green” option of same-day bike delivery.
DESIGN
We wanted our colors to stem from natural colors, but we also wanted to make our brand look happy and playful. As a team, we settled on a vibrant yellow and green/blue. We chose, as our secondary colors, lighter yellows, grays, and blues. Again, we wanted to convey joy and vibrancy and well as positive energy.
Our font is playful but solid. We wanted to make sure we appeared to be professional, but that we weren’t coming across as too corporate. Foxy is for small businesses and small communities, so it’s website and branding needs to reflect local community and lightheartedness.
Finally, our logo was made to emphasize these same concepts: lightheartedness, local community, and simple. We veered away from natural fox colors to emphasize the playful and clever aspect of our concept. The font felt anti-corporate and also reminded us of the swish of a fox’s tail.
PROTOTYPING
Our team of three began by each creating a paper prototype and then came together to create our first wireframes. This allowed us to pull from each others designs and make sure everyone’s designs were seen and used. Working in Adobe Xd, we designed mobile-first for this project.
After each iteration of our prototype in Xd, we conducted five user tests with different potential users. Some of these tests helps us clarify our value proposition and our feature prioritization for Foxy.
One of the biggest team decisions we came to was in regard to our website copy. Since Foxy is both for retailers to implement, but also needs shoppers to sign up, we needed to choose one target for our website copy, particularly the home page. We decided to market our home page copy to shoppers. If we could encourage consumers to sign up for Foxy, it would create demand for small businesses. The more shoppers we had interested, the more likely we would be able to encourage small businesses to use our service.
We made our first call to action lead directly into the shopping page, made sure to emphasize words like “shopping” and “shipping” and used wording such as “support small business you love.”
After final prototypes were finished, we successfully developed our design for desktop using html and css.
