Highline, an Online Marketplace for Cannabis
If you’re a New York pothead, you know — and have been celebrating for some time perhaps — that weed has become legal statewide. Not fully though. That’s going to be the case sometime in 2022 when it’s expected that cannabis sales will be a completely legal business to run. Who’s gonna take the greatest advantage of this fact?– the evil world of big pharma? some other big player? Wall Street? Yuck! What’s gonna happen to the sketchy dude that’s been selling it to you all these years? He’ll likely be brushed aside… Well, not if it’s up to us! I personally liked all the weed dealers I’ve ever dealt with, and the team I worked with on this project feels more or less the same.
We wanted to create an online destination that would pair all of us err.. users with all of the sketchy dudes or whomever and allow us to keep these greedy corporations out of our lives. Let me rephrase that to a more polite phrase: we had a vision of local NYS grown cannabis being delivered to your doorstep by small enterprises and sole proprietors while not compromising on the quality of service or god forbid goods.
Research
Initial Assumptions
People will want to be able to buy and sell marijuana online. Obvious? Yeah, but it will need to be validated in research.
People will like to safely and conveniently purchase weed. What do we mean by this? Well, sometimes you have your guy come to your house, sometimes he’ll just drive by, sometimes he’ll take you for a drive. Sometimes they are flaky, sometimes they’re not available… There’s always room for improvement.
Okay but other than validating our almost truisms we were hoping to get more information on what users would expect of such a marketplace. In any case we started our research by asking ourselves how might we help users sell marijuana remotely and safely?
User Interviews
Research Objective
To validate our assumptions and get more information on what potential hurdles might stand in the way of our vision.
We completed 5 interviews, took all the raw data from our interview notes and transcripts and then focused on looking for patterns using affinity mapping technique. Needless to say, our truisms as I like to call them were validated, but to our surprise, the participants we oddly focused on speed and status of their delivery.
“I like quick orders” and “I like to know where my order is” dominated the affinity mapping.
What are they talking about here?
Persona & Her Journey
We used the insights and created a persona that represents our users — Sophia, the aspiring TV producer studying media at NYU, originally from Cali... Obviously already used to dispensaries and online weed purchases.
After creating the persona we moved on to her journey map, a technique which can help us understand her emotional ups and downs during a typical weed purchasing scenario. What we got out of journey map was potential to improve her experience by adding verification and background checks for sellers, and snack-gifts to her orders.
Feature Prioritization Matrix and MoSCoW map
Few things left before we start working on our design. First one was to plan ahead and focus on which features are necessary for MVP. Search, Newsletter, Cart, Live Tracking, Seller Rating, are the most important amongst them.
Design
Design Studio
First time we ever participated in design studio. It was least to say an awesome experience. It allowed us to very quickly come together and just have fun with early design. No vanity, no time for vanity.
Mid-Fi Prototype
After finishing the design studio, with a clear idea of what we want in our next stage of design we created Mid-Fi wireframes. We called our first iteration “Bodega” thinking we’re so so cool.
Usability Testing
Objective
To see how easy it was for participants to navigate through the newly
designed website.
We gave our users 3 tasks:
1 to find Sour Diesel reviews
2 to find the cheapest Sour Diesel
3 to purchase some for their friend while sticking to the cheapest option
Takeaways
After testing and interviewing our participants we got some interesting new data. While they found the product to be straightforward and although it may have taken them longer time than we necessarily expected, every participant was able to complete each task.
What emerged from our follow up questions and observations was that our brand name was a bit misleading, the website seemed intimidating given dark background and lack of imagery (which would be addressed in final iteration regardless). Still, it made us think hard and despite us wanting to be cool calling our business Bodega (a filthy symbol of New York), Sophia would seemingly be weirded out by this name… So we reconsidered and came up with Highline (a bit fancier symbol of New York and a wordplay on a state you’re in when enjoying cannabis). Secondly, once we get to hi-fi, we thought, we’ll make the imagery look more fancy than filthy.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Usability Testing
Objective
To see how easy it was for participants to navigate through the newly
designed website.
Same 3 tasks:
1 to find Sour Diesel reviews
2 to find the cheapest Sour Diesel
3 to purchase some for their friend while sticking to the cheapest option
Takeaways
With all the colors added, specifically the green CTAs, it became a bit easier for participants to find the happy path, so task on time average improved significantly, not that we didn’t expect that. Other than that success rate average slightly increased.
When it comes to follow up questions we found out that users expected default sorting to be by price rather than best rated sellers and they would like the header to permanently stay on top, which is what we recommend would be the next steps.
