Goodz.io

OVERVIEW

Goodz aims to empower neighbourhoods with affordable and productive logistic deliveries by leveraging on neighbours’ daily commuting plans. With the eCommerce boom as a result of COVID-19, our operations team realised the market need for home businesses to have a more economical and communal option for their third-party logistic delivery.

It is a Peer-to-peer helpsourcing platform for home business to seek cheap, casual and ad hoc third party logistic delivery service that can be provided by their neighbour next door. It seeks to target the untapped labour market perpetuated by the global pandemic situation, such as students, housewives, the retrenched and retirees. That way, home-based businesses and freelancers have access to a cheaper and more ‘communal’ form of door-to-door delivery, and household users can take up side delivery tasks for additional pocket money while on their daily commute.

This initiative kickstarted our new business model and rebranding of Travelhorse, where we continue to expand our neighbourly logistic delivery network till this day.

Research

A quick online research shows that up to 40% of home businesses’ production costs attribute to third-party logistic delivery. Many existing third-party logistic providers such as EZBuy, Taobao, and Uber Delivery tend to have pricing models that eats into the total cost of home-based boutique businesses. With the emergence of eCommerce in light of the pandemic, I wanted to find a way to circumvent this situation and give these businesses a cheaper alternative to their third-party delivery arrangement.

One obvious way to go about this would be to leverage on the daily commutes of our neighbourhood or people nearby. The solution is hence a community-based one that helps users to 1) find a match, 2) browse matches’ details and 3) agree to paid matching terms for casual pick ups and delivery.

Ideate

Once we map our key findings, user stories and consolidated some design benchmarks, we begin producing some low fidelity sketches of multiple variations for ideation. We then eliminate some ideas after discussing on its usability and impact as you can see over here.

We finalized on a high-level concept solution and came up with key value propositions to be validated through our minimally viable product (MVP).

Before we kickoff our rapid prototyping sprint for the MVP, we also mapped out our targeted user journey with Goodz. We hypothesized that, instead of making advanced (but costly) arrangements with 3PLs or travelling to the nearest post office (and risk exposing to COVID-19), sellers can now have their items picked up and delivered within the confines of their home, while having a more communal interaction with their neighborhood runners.

Design

Initially, due to time constraints, we went straight ahead to develop a high fidelity prototype with Flutter. The results turned out as below:

This turned out to be a mistake, as we realised from our corporate advisors and ideasinc mentors (this MVP was even used at the hackathon!) that the MVP was of poor UI quality and gives a bad branding to our business if we ever test it with real customers. There were also some redundant features as a result of not validating our user requirements with low or medium level wireframes first. It was a costly mistake as we went too quickly on designing the solution.

Moving forward, we took a step back to develop medium-fidelity wireframes as per below:

Check out full sequential board in mid-fidelity:

Test and refine

In a guerilla testing fashion, I demonstrated the wireframe and gathered critique and feedback from 3 professional connections. The purpose is to validate on the essential screen layouts, navigation system and features that work and do not work well with users. These are consolidated into the below brief, which summarizes key user concerns and my UI remediation reflected in the next iteration.

We further refined our UI in high-fidelity into the following, based on the aforementioned user responses:

Check out full sequential storyboard in high-fidelity.

Final Evaluation

Indeed, we demonstrated the final iteration of our prototype again, this time, with existing Travelhorse clients from the F&B industry. We received positive reception to this concept, and have 2 business sign ups for beta-testing. Some snippets of our feedback are as follow:

Key Takeaways

1. Fail faster, learn faster – we should try to learn our mistakes earlier by breaking into smaller design sprints with more user testings so that next iterations are less costly.
2. Stakeholders management is important when testing MVPs – how may we synch up with clients’ busy schedules? How do we manage expectations on product developments.

EXTRAS

These are some past mentions of Travelhorse on media and press which gave us more credibility when we pitched Goodz to investors.

Check out my full pitch deck here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16_X0N8i7vYExr3KSoYyDMyexLkV9ONs2/view?usp=sharing