Price Detective - Price Matching App
Expertise
UX Research,
UX Design
Platforms
Deliverables
Storyboards,
Sketches,
Prototypes.
Project Overview
People spend a lot of money, making purchases every day. Prices for items tend to change from time to time. In order to increase sales, stores run promotions and make discounts on select items. Often stores have a price match policy to guarantee the lowest price to customers even after they make a purchase, but according to Forrester Research Analyst only 5 to 10% of customers use price match to save money (Tuttle, 2013). This happens because stores do everything they can to forfeit customers from using price match. Major retailers run new deals every day and it is almost impossible for a person to track all of them manually. And retailers will never notify customers about a new discount on items that they just bought, but our app will do that.
Project Goals
- Improve skills in project management, UI/UX design and UX research.
- Develop an application to make price matching more accessible to the average person
Team
It was a team of four people - all are computer science students at University of Washington. We were all involved in the end-to-end design process which included user research, designing the screens, and developing interactive prototypes.
My Role
I was a team leader, and took responsibility for organizing my team, defining scope of our project, distributing tasks and checking all the work. While other team members were working on conducting surveys and interviews, I centered my efforts on deriving obtained research data and designing a great product, drawing paper prototypes, refining them and creating an interactive digital prototype in Figma.
Solution Overview
In order to make price matching more accessible to the average person we developed Price Detective, a mobile application that displays price history, saves purchase data, and notifies the user when savings and/or refunds are possible. In order to fully utilize this app the user simply scans their receipts from supported retailers and from there much of the functionality is automated and the user will receive update notifications when a match is found.
Research
Online Surveys
The intent of our research was to find out certain behaviors of our target audience. We wanted to know if people had used price matching/tracking services before, if they do product research, and if they would be interested in an application to save money on their purchases.
From surveys we determined that most people do not use price trackers regularly (only on larger purchases) and tend to never ask for a price match after the purchase of an item. We also derived that a younger audience would be more likely to use such tracking software and would utilize price matching policies if they were more convenient to use.
Target Audience
From surveys we validated our claim that a younger audience would be more likely to use such tracking software and would utilize price matching policies if they were more convenient to use, so our target audience is people 18-24 years, especially students and lower income households.
Competitive Analysis
We defined three main competitors for our app: Honey, Groupon, and CapitalOne Shopping. After careful review of each of them we came up to the conclusion that neither of mentioned services provides price matching features, but all of them provide some kind of price tracking for different items online. While Honey and CapitalOne have automatic price tracking for items users chose, as well as a dedicated deals tab with coupons and cashback, Groupon only offers deals and cashback for services and experiences, but not for actual products that are selling online, or in-store. So, as a result of competitive analysis, we concluded that our app has only two major competitors: Honey and CapitalOne Shopping, but competition is limited only to price-tracking features and doesn't affect our main price matching feature.
Key Findings
- Younger audience would be more likely to use such tracking software and would utilize price matching policies if they were more convenient to use.
- There are no price matching services that would be cmpetitors with our app.
- Our target audience is people in ages 18-24.
- Ease of use is critical for user to consider price match through our app.
Design
Story boards
To test interface ideas and get initial feedback I made low fidelity paper sketches. While sketching I came up with two different approaches for implementation of smart home feature: the first approach is a widget for Alexa app in the new widget board, which was introduced in Windows 11, and the second approach is the user interfaces integrated in a control center as a new window right over standard windows 11 controls UI. Second approach is more seamless and better for UX, but it relates on a heavier development efforts and partnership of Amazon and Microsoft.
Sketches
We used data obtained from our research phase, and gathered all ideas to brainstorm and define initial sketches of the interface. We made sketches of different fidelity levels, improving them with time.
Our two main functionalities that we wanted to focus our efforts on was entering in user purchase data via scanning a receipt and utilizing the price match request to receive a refund. The first function is vital to not only compare the users purchase to find them a price match if one exists but also to act as another way to build the database price history and ensure it's consistency with additional scraping methods. The second function is vital for being the main reason someone would use our app as it is the primary function to simplify price match policy navigation and use.
Digital Prototypes
Main Screens:
These are the main screens of the app. Home screen is an adaptive dashboard, tailored to user needs. It shows important information, selects popular deals, based on user's interests and keeps track of price changes for saved items.
Saved Items, All Deals and All Coupons
Here are the secondary screens for saved items feature and two more screens that show all available deals and coupons.
Scanning Receipts and Purchase Details Screens
Here we refined the process of scanning user receipts, finding price matches, notifying the user if any are available now, and saving displaying return policy with just a few intuitive clicks.
Redeeming Price Match and Settings Screens
Here we show how simple it is to process a request with just two clicks, a lot of the process being automated on the back end which the user does not see such as reviewing that retailers price match policy, filling out any necessary forms, sending any information required to process the request, and notifying the user the status of the request.
Testing
Usability Testing Findings
Reviewing feedback from the evaluation our main problems stemmed from icons not being intuitive or navigation not being clear or the entire search function being unnecessary for our intended use of the product. We changed this is the final digital mock up to reflect the feedback received and added additional smaller functionalities to make the apps use more attractive such as user accounts and basic login, saved items, and coupons.