Futu

Furniture shopping made simple.

Overview

Futu is a furniture company that specializes in designing and selling Scandinavian furniture. Products that they are selling are sofas, chairs, tables, and lamps. Customers can choose between casual or more office-oriented furniture.

Project goals

The goal is to build a simple to use shopping app, that will allow customers to order desired items and get them shipped to their home or office.

Business Goals

The business goal is to attract new customers, increase sales and make a profit.

ROle

UX
Defining the problem
Research
Building Personas
Creating User Stories and User Flows
Wireframing
Prototyping
UI

duration

June – July 2019

Tools

Pen & paper
Adobe CC
Adobe XD
Figma

The Problem

As everything is going digital today, Futu has decided to follow that trend and to make an app that will make selling to their customers much easier and faster.

Problems and pain-points that customers are facing:

Not able to shop when they want
Time consuming
Convenience
Availability
Etc.

Quantitative Research

Each year the number of users who purchase using smartphones is increasing rapidly. Research is done by Forrester’s 2018 Retail Best Practices: Mobile Web study found that smartphones will be used in over one-third or more than $1 trillion of total U.S retail sales at some point in the process of buying something in 2018, including research, price comparison, and purchases.

Through the research, we found that more people are trying to live a simplified lifestyle and they are choosing a more modern and simpler environment to live in. The market for this type of furniture is growing every day.

Summarizing these findings, we believe that making a shopping app in 2019 is a smart move for your business.

Potential solutions

Building this shopping app will solve majority of pain points that customers are facing.
Here are some of the advantages of using app:

Being able top shop 24/7
Save time – in store shopping can be time consuming, particularly if customers have to visit multiple stores in different locations.
Save money – customers can compare pricing and find best deals for them
Convenience – as our target audience, many people dislike crowds, cashier lineups, etc. and prefer to shop from home
Availability – it is much easier to find products online

NOTE: In the second version of Futu shopping app would like to add AR (augmented reality) feature to allow customers to “import/show” furniture in their homes or offices, to see how they fit.

Target Audience

We can divide the target audience into two categories:

First target audience is young to middle age people, from 18 to 50 years old, who like the clean, modern and simple design and lifestyle. They live simplified lives without necessary distractions and useless things around them.
The second category is companies and coworking spaces who want to have comfortable and modern working spaces for their employees or tenants.

Creating User Stories

User stories helped me to understand how to align user needs with business goals.

Here are some of them:

As a user, I want to be able to create an account.
As a user, I want to be able to search for certain furniture category.
As a user, I want to be able to filter my search.
As a user, I want to be able to add products to my wishlist.
As a user, I want to be able to purchase products.
As a user, I want to be able to read and leave reviews for products.
As a user, I want to be able to save my default shipping address.
As a user, I want to be able to save my preferred payment method.

User Flow

This User Flow show us every path that user follows through app interface to complete a task.

Wireframes

Before starting creating high fidelity designs and prototypes, I prefer to start with paper wireframes. Paper wireframes are simple to make and we can test and validate ideas very fast.

UI and Visuals

Application is designed with an accent on modern, simple and clean design. Custom shapes are used for components, to make them elegant and appealing for customers.

Typography

Colors

Main colors used for this app are white and gold. White is used as a primary color, and gold is used as a secondary or accent color to emphasize the call to actions.

Focus is on content/products and we didn’t want to distract users from them with some strong colors. Black is mainly used for text, and subtle gray is used for the background.

Icons

Prototype

After finalizing the visual design, I made this interactive prototype that will help users get better insights and understanding of the app.

Also, we can get useful feedback about how users are interacting with the prototype and what we have to improve for the next version of the app.

Visit this link to view interactive prototype: Figma prototype

Next Steps

Next step is to start working with developers on developing app.
Second step is to design and build custom features with augmented reality to allow users to insert/preview furniture in their homes or offices.

Thank you for reading this case study. If you have anything to ask or you are interested in collaboration, feel free to contact me.

Looking for someone to collaborate with, or just to say hello?
Feel free to reach me out 😀
mihajlobudo@gmail.com