lokabees is a responsive web app designed to help local small businesses connect with their neighbourhoods.
UX/UI Designer
- userflow development
- high fidelity mock-ups
- prototyping
- bug testing
March 2020 - June 2021
The Coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a standstill in 2020. Particularly hard-hit were the small businesses.
Before the pandemic, many small businesses in Germany were still operating offline as cash-based businesses and with little utilization of any sort of e-commerce methods. We also knew that larger businesses have done exceptionally well because of their adoption of technology and an already well-established logistical network.
We wanted to build a tool that would help these small businesses adapt to a changing world in the online sphere that was easy for them to manage and where they could feel secure doing business online. We also wanted to help these businesses get discovered by the surrounding neighbourhood.
We wanted to conduct 2 surveys, one for shoppers and one for store owners as these are the two major user groups who will use the platform. Unfortunately, due to initial time constraints we knew that getting shops online was a crucial first step so we decided to survey shop owners first, and included a plan to add surveys online to our initial shoppers after our MVP was live.
1. How do they want to communicate with customers?
2. How tech-savvy are they?
3. What products/categories are these shops selling?
We found that many of the shops we spoke to were at least minimally active online with some sort of website or social media. But we also found that 42% of shop owners did not have a way to sell their goods online.
We decided that another main functionality of the lokabees platform would have to include education. We wanted our shop owners to feel comfortable online. Therefore, a better understanding of the various facets of e-commerce would be required.
In order to help understand what pages we needed to design for and how we would break it down further into what we needed for an MVP, we created a site map. It was broken down into 3 phases, starting with MVP. As we gained more data from users phases 2 and 3 would become more informed by how people were using the platform.
One important aspect of this project was the blending of two teams: Get It! and Small Business Hero. Our projects shared a similar thesis, and we decided we could be stronger together. We merged our teams and our concepts into one: lokabees.
The concept itself required an overhaul to ensure alignment.
We started with the homepages from each team and worked on blending the best parts from each side. This meant largely holding on to the UI framework from Small Business Hero but adopting the backend and some of the concepts from Get It!.
You can see below, the design from Get It! on the left, Small Business Hero in the middle, and the final design for lokabees on the right.
As the developers got to work and we began to have elements of our product that we could test. We had other non-product-facing team members test our user flows for critical errors. Our goal was to ensure we caught the biggest and most obvious problems before launching the MVP with real users.
Due to the volunteer nature of this project, and as our lives began to pick up pace later in the pandemic, unfortunately the lokabees project was never completed.
Designed and built by Jessica Hurford in 2024 using Webflow.
