Team
1 Designer
4 Experience Managers
My Role
UX/UI Design Consulting Brand Design
Industry
Charity
Duration
8 weeks
About Hazaar
Hazaar is the UK’s first student only zero-waste marketplace, aiming to make sustainable ways of living accessible and fun for young people. Throughout my time at Hazaar, I have incubated and led a number of projects to mature the app experience beyond their initial MVP.
Over time the brand has evolved to have a B2C and a B2B component, working with universities to deliver waste-reducing solutions to campus. They have recently started branching out to partner with brands too, preventing off-season garments from ending up in landfill.
This project was part of a volunteering initiative at Publicis Sapient called <Codeaid>, partnering with charities to use our digital skills for good. With minimal funding and a lack of online presence, The Salford-based charity we partnered with aims to educate and offer support to survivors of domestic abuse. The new website and branding offers a trustworthy and information rich experience to help survivors and their loved ones to navigate challenging environments and relationships.
Requirements
Key challenges faced
Using these pillars to inform the design process, myself and another UX designer created wireframes to start building out the experience. Since our core personas are likely to be in vulnerable situations, it was important for us to take a mobile-first approach as mobile devices are a lot more discreet and personal. Once these were fleshed out and designs were signed off, we then moved onto desktop and tablet designs.
Design exploration
We identified key user needs based on the personas identified and the existing website experience:
Outcome
With new visual identity and website restructure, the new Survivor Project website is a destination for education, support and reassurance. The ability to discover and learn is disclosed in a progressive way, sensitively disclosing information in a frank but compassionate tone.
Key design decisions
Verified Badges
PDP & Brand Destination Redesign
Browse Category Interaction & Brand Tiles
Other projects at Hazaar
For the time I worked with Hazaar, I was the only designer on the team and was solely responsible for the evolution of the app (post-MVP). I worked on several projects to help shape the digital strategy of the brand and evolve our experiences as the business grew.
Browse experience
Hazaar's offering is grounded in the idea that each university has it's own marketplace so that students don't have to pay postage and packing when buying items. This segregation of items means that when launching at a new university, there are a low number of listings.
A big part of this work was to enhance the approach for the browse pages to make it as easy as possible to not only search for items but also discover items to increase engagement. This resulted in a restructure of the browse page and introduction of curated lists.
Buy and sell
When users purchase items through the app, they meet up in person to exchange items and complete the sale to reduce waste and emissions from postage and packing. The MVP experience was functional but wasn't providing the best experience.
Along with this, Hazaar began offering in-person events to students to help build communities on campus. This meant having a cashless, app-based mechanism to enable students to buy and sell in person, as well as through browsing in the app.
Optimising onboarding
A user pain-point experienced at in-person events was the time taken complete a sale if they are a new user, because they would need to type in their email on the spot and make an account.
My responsibility involved auditing the existing journey, conducting and analysing usability tests to understand opportunities for improvement, and redefining a new onboarding journey to cater to our users who are under more time pressure to access the buy & sell feature.
Information architecture
The MVP app exhibited the very fundamental functionality needed for the business to operate, but as the service and its offerings grew in scale and complexity, the IA of the app no longer aligned with the direction of the business.
My role involved aligning with Hazaar stakeholders to understand short and long-term future states to future-proof a reimagined information architecture.
Website redesign
As Hazaar started gaining traction with universities across the UK, the website experience felt outdated and misaligned with the look and feel of the app and their social media presence.
I was responsible for re-designing the website to appeal to a B2B and B2C audience base. This included redefining the information architecture, copy writing and content design.
& more…
Working on an ever evolving product meant that every element of the app needed considering. We even implemented features, such as an events space, due to the business exploring this route as an offering, but has been removed as a result of a change in business direction.
We have been very responsive as a brand to rapidly iterate to test and learn as we go along, instead of dwelling too much on perfectionism, which has ultimately resulted in an award-winning business.