Cartpool
A shopping platform
A startup created through USC’s premiere incubator LavaLabs. My team and I also won the “Best Demo” award at LavaLab’s Demo Day.
Team
Me (Designer)
Zhamaika (Product Manager)
Anandini (Developer)
Minnah (Developer)
Role
Lead Product Designer
Oversaw vision, strategy, created the design system
Timeline
February-April 2024
Skills
Branding, pitch decks, UX design, UX Research, Prototyping
Sneak Peek
Shop international brands
A one stop shop for purchasing international products. Add the link of your desired product and all the items will add to your centralized cart.
Safe and Reliable Payment
Pay for products safely with reliable payment sources such as paypal, etc.
-1.png)
-1.png)
Affordable Shipping
Shopping from abroad can be expensive, but we made it cheap for you! Pickup your products at selected pickup spots for half the price.
Problem
1. Coordinating group orders are difficult
2. Expensive shipping fees
3. Limited payment methods (unreliable)
How might we create a streamlined experience for shoppers to purchase international brands at an affordable price?
Research
Interviews
Interviewed over 30 people and discovered pain points
Quantitative
Analyzed over 10 reports and articles and media stats like reddit threads
Journey Map
Examined 3 user journey
Sam lived in Europe for a few years and just moved back to the U.S. He misses his favorite European stores and can’t find any clothes he likes in the U.S. He wants to purchase clothes from abroad but finds the shipping fee to be quite expensive. None of his friends want to group order because they’re not interested in fashion like him.
Melody is a huge kpop fan. She regularly purchases fan products and collects fan cards. To purchase these kpop products, she goes through a long and sketchy process. She finds resellers on Instagram and sends them money hoping that they aren’t a scam. She finds it difficult to purchase her desired products and finds the process tiresome, suspicious, and not reliable.
Findings
01.
There’s a huge market for people that purchase products from abroad
71 million people that purchase overseas e-commerce orders in the US every year and it’s a $160 billion e-commerce market. People buy from multiple stores having to pay multiple international fees, and shipping costs.
02.
Purchasing products from abroad is confusing and the UI of the international websites are poor
Many popular international brands have both a local and international website. The international website is usually not updated as much and can be difficult to order from.
03.
The payment process can be unsafe and not reliable.
Many people are suspicious of the international payment process or find it difficult. Many kpop fans pay with venmo before receiving their product.
Created a platform where people can purchase international products from different companies but pay on 1 website.
Design one centralized website with clean and user friendly UI. Users can easily search up their favorite products.
Implemented customer’s preferred payment methods such as Visa, American Express, etc.
Challenges
1. Our market kept changing so the product kept changing.
Initially it was for kpop fans to make the market specific. Then we made it more broad to any customer purchasing products abroad.
2. We had too many feature ideas and needed to simplify the product.
We wanted to implement too many features. Our MVP was suppose to be quite simple with only basic features.
3. I’ve never made used Figma animations and pitch decks on Figma.
It was a huge learning curve using animations on Figma. It was alot of fun but very tedious. I also learned to make interactive pitch decks on Figma.
Sitemap and User flow
Wireframes
All my wireframes and drafts. I drew inspiration from current kpop websites, resellers, brand shopping companies, and international companies.
Moodboard
All my wireframes and drafts. I drew inspiration from current kpop websites, resellers, brand shopping companies, and international companies.
What I’ve learned
1. It’s crucial to communicate with developers
This was my first project working with developers and I learned how to become a better designer. I realized my developers relied heavily on Figma ‘Dev Mode’ and learned how to auto layout my designs so it can be easily understood on the dev mode side. Before I used auto layout and dev mode, my designs visually looked the same but internally messy. It was difficult to communicate with them because they would ask for the padding and I would make up a random number. When they coded my designs, the UI didn’t match up such as the color was a different Hex number, the fonts weren’t the same, and they used random drop shadows. After reorganizing the format of my designs and communicating with them my UI standards, the designs slowly started to change to look like mine. It still wasn’t perfect at the end, but it taught me alot about communiation.
2. Organization is key
This was my biggest solo design project and staying organized was important. Instead of having frame 1590, I labeled the frame to “login frame”. I copied each new iteration onto another page. I organized the style guide with components for efficiency. I learned how to use auto layout to organize all my designs. These are design habits I learned and will be continuing for all future projects.
3. A pitch deck is about storytelling
I never designed my own pitch decks and rarely used them besides class presentations. With weekly pitches by my PM, I had to create weekly pitch decks to match her pitch. I learned how to use innovative Figma animations and how to tell her story through a creative deck. This process was the most challenging for me as the first impression of our product was through the pitch deck. However, I realized the pitch deck is powerful in telling the story and can move investors to want to invest or spread awareness of our product.
