I co-founded the design agency Creativitea in 2008 and led the digital department for 8 years. Buyapowa, one of the country’s leading startups working in e-commerce hired my digital team to develop the UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) of their new social commerce platform. The first client, Debenhams Lingerie.
Designing The User experience
The focus of social selling is that the power is with the audience. The more people that sign up to a particular deal, the cheaper the product becomes.
Whilst thinking about e-commerce design best practices to develop the product’s UX we had to make this user experience fun and rewarding for users through gamification and micro-interactions.
So it became a contest between users who could get the most people to sign up to the deal. The winner was rewarded with some kind of prize donated by the client. We had to design multiple web design interfaces to deal with different kinds of sales techniques whilst making it clear the user had to share. We had to excite the users and get their dopamine running through micro-interactions which would result in more traffic, engagement and sales volume.
Gamification to encourage sharing
It was a tough challenge because at every turn we had to encourage social sharing through the users network. We still had to ensure the the e-commerce route to basket was quick, easy and without distractions to get the sale complete. Through several iterations and user testing we opted to use a browser based design tool to efficiently put the user journeys we were learning about into practice without the costly developing costs. Something we really enjoyed working on!
Final Thoughts
When designing for Software As A Service (SaaS) companies like Buyapowa you’re always developing the root product which acts as the company’s core offering. Designing this website for Debenhams allowed us to flesh out and test initial ideas which then could be implemented and sold to other brands. I am really proud to have been part of the launch phase of Buyapowa and helping them build something that would be built upon as the business grew. During my time working with Buyapowa we helped develop the main product’s User Experience and Interface, using what we learned for other brands.
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