Mobile shipping app for e-commerce merchants

Problem

In early 2019, 50-60% of new trial sign ups for ShippingEasy started on a mobile device. Towards the middle of 2019, we had adjusted our onboarding workflow to be mobile responsive to help people get set up. The mobile experience ended once the set up work flow was complete. We used a band-aid solution for several months that directed people to move from their mobile device on to a laptop or desktop computer.

ShippingEasy was unlikely to convert new mobile sign ups into customers because new sign ups were not able to use the app on their mobile device.

Research

Sample of our initial questions included:

• How do our users currently use their mobile devices to operate their business?

• What apps do our customers use to support their business?

• Are there any correlations between someone who uses their mobile device to support their business and demographics/psychographics?

After hashing out all of our questions, we built a survey via Typeform (50+ responses) and asked open ended questions to several users, some of whom had previously attempted to use our desktop app on a mobile device.

Research findings:

• Most all merchants have been operating their stores for more than 2 years

• About half of merchants operated their ecommerce business as their primary source of income, though about 40% operated as a secondary source of income.

• A third of merchants surveyed spent 11-20 hours per week on ther ecommerce business.

• ⅔ merchants said they process several orders at the same time.

• Half of respondents said they used mobile apps “very frequently” to support their ecommerce business in the last 30 days, with another 25% responding “somewhat frequently”.

• 85% of respondents had never attempted to buy a shipping label from their mobile device. 62% had never printed anything from their mobile device.

Hypotheses

The research and planning for this project was performed with product management. Together we presented our research and hypothesis to internal stakeholders to get buy-in and set a product roadmap.

Business Hypothesis: If we create a mobile web responsive experience centered around creating a first label, we will see an increase in user conversion on ShippingEasy as an extension of our existing mobile responsive onboarding flow.

User hypothesis: If we help the user understand they can save money on shipping, we hope they will migrate to the desktop to gain efficiency with their shipping process and use mobile to augment their experience.

Design concepts

We spent roughly 6 months designing a MVP experience to help users view orders, browse carrier rates, and create 1 label on their mobile device. Many details were sorted out in this time period between design and product management.

Design validation

• Remote moderated usability testing (1 round, 5+ sessions)

• Unmoderated concept testing and open questions with Usability Hub (1 round, 150+ responses)

Product development

Our partners in engineering started building an entirely new front end in react that would serve new or existing users data in a responsive web application. This type of approach was new, and it was important that we built a solid framework to build more features on top of. Our new UI would be rooted in the desktop version, but would have affordances for a user on a mobile device.

ShippingEasy merchants had long wanted a mobile version and the decision was made to quickly launch something and begin gathering usage data. Our launched version was a simple order view with no list view. This would come later in a sequence of planned updates.

Release 1:

• Ability to view and edit order data synced from a store platform to become a shipment

• Configure and buy a shipping label

• Navigate to other (non-responsive) areas of the application

Release 2:

• Create a one-off shipment from scratch

• Sync store data, create new store connections (order sources)

• Edit line items in an existing order

Release 3:

• View a list of orders

• Sort a list of orders

• Skeleton loading states, and enhanced mobile interaction design

Future releases

• Order search, expanded shipping options, browse rates experience, print queue, shipment history

Design deliverables

Primary user flow for release 1:

MVP Version