Astralive
Astralive is an innovative B2B2C e-commerce platform that fuses live streaming with AI-driven speech and video engagement analytics. Businesses can connect with customers in real time, offering an immersive and interactive shopping experience.
Project Scope
Client project
Timeframe: 3 week sprint
Role: Researcher, Designer
Team: Potoula Anagnostakos with three other designers
Methods: Generative Research, Data Synthesis, Journey Map, Personas, Evaluative Research
Tools: Figma, Trello, Maze, Google Workspace
Deliverables:
User interviews and insights
Competitive analysis
User personas, flows journeys
Mid-fidelity and interactive high-fidelity prototypes
Usability tests and insights
Problem Online sellers need accessible and reliable 1:1 communication to provide product information for shoppers and for shoppers to minimize their external research and make informed shopping decisions.
Generative Research, Data Synthesis
Our team was tasked with creating a 1:1 video call feature that benefitted both buyers and sellers on the platform. To understand how best to design this feature, we first needed to understand what buyers and sellers look for in an online shopping platform, what successful and unsuccessful experiences looked like, and what their individual goals were.
To do so, we conducted 11 user interviews to better understand the pain points and benefits of shopping and selling products online. We learned that from the seller’s perspective, it was imperative to know what’s trending, what their customers want, and how best to track their overall engagement. It was crucial for sellers to be able to track KPI’s such as revenue, units sold, conversion rates, and popular items so it ensured that they could do so in our design.
On the buyers’ side, they enjoyed the ease and convenience of shopping online, that a person could shop anywhere they want. The live stream aspect, which we designed for, stood out as a unique feature that’s on the uprise in the e-commerce space. While shopping online, buyers also expressed the importance of being able to someone assist you as you search for the right product. The type of assistance would play into the 1:1 call feature.
Once we identified these key themes, we ran an analysis of which comparable buyer and seller features are provided by similar apps. We saw that competitors like BuyWith and Bambuser have both a 1:1 and chat feature, so we needed to figure out how best to strategize and design Astralive’s 1:1 call feature to stand out in the market and address our users’ pain points.
Flow through User Journeys
We used our insights gathered from our users to create personas that embodied our users’ behaviors, goals, pain points, and motivations. This helped us keep our users at the core of our design. The seller, as the primary user, sought a platform to easily market their products and grow their customer base. The buyer, as the secondary user, shopped mostly online because of its convenience and wanted assistance in purchasing the right product.
Based on our research insights, we developed How Might We’s (HMWs) to focus our efforts in addressing the pain points for both buyers and sellers:
…provide the seller with the necessary insights to increase customer engagement while on a 1:1 live session?
…utilize the live support feature to improve key performance indicators?
…implement a system to conveniently schedule 1:1 video chats with prospective buyers?
…improve the customer’s level of product knowledge and guide customers effectively through product discovery?
…help customers build a credible relationship with a sales associate?
…assist customers that have product inquiries schedule a chat session with a sales associate?
We then designed flows that showed each step and decision that users could make in the process of joining a 1:1 call. This helped us identify what call to action buttons would need to be implemented into the design and what goal they would solve for our users.
Evaluative Research
We incorporated our user flows into a prototype so we could conduct usability tests. We wanted to make sure that users, acting as both buyers and sellers, could easily schedule a 1:1 video call, interact with its features, and conclude the process by ending the call. We used Maze to track our users actions and the time it took for them to complete them, which would could see in the software’s quantitative data.
When we analyzed our results from usability testing, we saw that while users successfully completed the 1:1 call experience as both sellers and buyers, they had some difficulty in navigating to the call itself.
Some feedback we received was to enlarge the call to action icon, which a buyer would click on in order to schedule a 1:1 call, and to create a button so a seller can join the call directly from their calendar.
Final Prototype
Gathering user feedback provided us the opportunity to learn what worked, what could be improved, and to design a more complete, user-focused, and efficient product for Astralive. In our final version, users easily joined a 1:1 call, gained relevant product information, welcomed additional product recommendations, and concluded the checkout process.
Insights
While these are the results of our 3 week sprint, we are confident in Astralive's potential to be so more much. Given more time, we would have liked to go more in depth with the mobile version of the scheduler as well as an account for admins to access their team's analytics. We designed a few mock ups for our clients and will be handing them over to help visualize the potential of these experiences. We would have also liked to explore how the seller can customize their KPI's in the performance page, which can allow sellers to have their own unique dashboard.