BTA#5| A tough November of building up “夾泥搬磚小站” step by step

Hi there, it’s Mariana.

After almost an entire month of staying up till 3am to deal with all the final presentations and projects, I finally finished building up the high-fidelity prototype for my project named JwotaBuys (“夾泥搬磚小站”). It was a huge load of work with both time and mind-consuming debugging process, and the users that I interviewed with had all been impressed by what’s achieved during the period between the two usability tests, because compared to the Figma version last time, it now started to look like a real site!

Visit JwotaBuys via PythonAnywhere
(click here)

The proposed monetization plan for my site is subscription-based. To help Johnny’s fans in China save money and trouble when they purchase albums from Japanese shopping sites, I try to build up a in-site community for them to form share-shipping groups. With subscription to premium membership, the users will have the access to “price comparison” function, being able to review the all-in-one comparison of different prices, discounts and shipping fee of the same CD in different shopping sites.
Such features may help them get a clearer overview and proceed to make wiser decisions in selecting their ideal site.

The core functions of my site are three: (1) details (content and release info) of the albums to be released in a short while; (2) price comparison; (3) a “billboard” to post and browse posts of group-forming.

Usability Test

For the usability test, I tried to come up with eight small tasks which would altogether form the whole experience of using the site to get primary information related to the albums and their sales on different shopping websites and to find ideal share-shipping groups. The details of the eight tasks are as follows:

(1) 查看最近发售的碟
(2) 从所有商品中筛选出“专辑”
(3) 查看SixTONES新单信息
(4) 比较该单曲各平台价格
(5) 查看拼邮相关信息
(6) 向发帖人发送私信
(7) 发布一条拼邮帖子
(8) 查看私信列表

By asking users to complete each task, I tried to observe the route they chose (e.g. which section to go and which button to click) and their special reactions such as confusion and hesitation. Also, to examine their will to register and upgrade to premium membership, I also paid attention to how they react to the pop-up window that asked them to be a member, checking out whether they questioned on such features or expressed impatience.

At the end of the test, I also asked the volunteers to give some feedback on their overall user experience, comparison between the two versions (the other one is the figma prototype) and possible suggestions for further improvements.

A/B Test

For the A/B test, I made my adjustment basically on the navigation bar. When I was designing my navigation bar, what I initially put right behind “首页” was “关于小站” instead of “新碟发售” and “拼邮专区” which I was a bit unsure whether it would affect the chances for users to click on the other two columns to visit the core functions and be led to sign up to my site. So for the B version, I changed the order of the three columns, trying to find out whether it would make any difference.

However, the 2-day period of test turned out that the original actually performed better which made me decided to keep the previous design. One thing worth mentioning is that, some volunteers that I shared the link with reported that they were a bit confused because some of the functions were still fake at the moment. Such confusion and impatience caused by unfinished functions may also affect their user experience.

For more about my assignment this week, plz visit my website
(click here)