[ SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS ]
What products and themes do people collect the most?
Statues
46
%
Toys
56
%
Action Figures
51
%
Geek Gift Registry is a niche price-comparison shopping portal for geeky pop culture collectibles, affiliated with multiple e-commerce platforms. The client himself is a back end developer.
To create a one-stop wish list website and shopping portal for a vast range of pop culture collectibles ranging from action figures to apparel, across various TV, Film & Video Game themes.
Sketch, InVision
UX Design Lead
Domain research, comparative competitive analysis, user research, survey writing, interviews, persona identification, feature finalization, A/B testing, customer journey map, storyboarding, paper prototypes, shared library master, mid fi wireframes, high fidelity mockups, project management, product management
Currently, the collectible industry is a $12 billion dollar industry in North America alone.
In Walmart, for example, collectibles are growing faster than other products and with a decent 30% profit margin. Microsoft is partnering with FONKO, a large collectibles manufacturing company with $700 million in sales every year.
Streaming services and social media generate hype and help reach larger audiences, influencing the growth of the collectibles market at a faster rate than ever. Within the market, video game collectibles in particular seem to have the highest growth.
[ SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS ]
After collecting psychographic & demographic data from our user research, we grouped the data into an affinity diagram to determine the patterns. We noticed that the most popular age range of collectors was between 20–30 years old. So our 26-year-old persona, Jason Pierce, comes to life. From our data, we learn that he needs to be able to compare prices of collectibles online, find good deals, and make a wish list so friends & family know what to get him. He wants to keep building his collection in a way this is fun, smart & engaging.
We are now able to start narrowing down our features, moving onto the next stage of planning where we determine what is urgent for this MVP, and what could happen further down the line.
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Our UI team solidifies the final branding of the product, after a series of mood boards, consults with the client, and style directions.
Meanwhile on the UX side, we have also began paper prototyping and the first round of testing. Because we’re doing responsive web, a lot of our comprehensive and in-depth search filters have to be modified to fit small mobile screens. We want to do this in the cleanest way as possible, while also not cutting any important filters, checkbox or otherwise. We decide on a hamburger menu pop-up side list that contains an accordion drop-down list that can be open and closed for cleanliness, as well as an open/close side pop-up filter.
This also means that some of our single pages on desktop actually wind up being two pages on mobile, an important consideration to keep in mind as we move on to further prototyping. We have also decided to not include ads in the mobile version, only on desktop. This is common, as mobile screens are just too small.
We divide our screens accordingly to their flows (search filter flow, wish list flow, account set-up flow etc.) and let our users test each flow separately, before we finally merge them all together. We quickly learn from our testing that our dashboard can include more functions, our sharing wish list function is unclear, and that people are unsure what fields are required for them to fill out in some forms. Our comprehensive search filter and price comparison chart, however, were super clear, which is great to hear as these are our main features. Many people don’t like the idea of birth year in the profile either. We decide to not get too complicated with our required fields in the profile, and have it so users only need to list their name/username. If they wanted to fill in any of the other categories, such as favourite movies, hobbies, collections etc, they are free to do so at their own will.
We also learn that we’re missing some in-between screens, and rather than try and create extra community board screens in our short time-frame, it is better to focus on delivering a really solid MVP with our main features as polished as possible.
