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Massdrop Mobile App Design

Dec 11, 20161455 VIEWS

Hi everyone, I'm a UX designer who has been using Massdrop for awhile.
I love what it is now, and see opportunities for it to grow by having a native app with its experience designed around how we use Massdrop.
I have made a personal project in my free time for this, and thought I will share it in Mech Keys' talks since my mockups were made for Mech Keys community.
This project was first posted on my site: http://www.kevinyao.net/gallery/massdrop-mobile-app-design/

Massdrop has been growing over the years with their mission to “Bring enthusiasts together”.Its users are highly engaged to the type of products they live with. Audiophiles, mechanical keyboard typists, and fountain pen writers for example.Whenever I visit Massdrop, I’m always amazed by the passion and conversations fostered within its communities. What I see is an opportunity for Massdrop to:

Faciliate more conversations,
Stick to its users better, and
Leverage sales off more consumer micro-moments and motivations.

As a personal project, I have designed an app for Massdrop to achieve the above goals, with my research done through observing the platform and its users.

The Core UX of Massdrop To guide my design, I’ll first define the core UX of Massdrop. The essence of how users benefit from being part of Massdrop.
As enthusiasts in each community, we initiate and participate in polls and chats about products we love. In doing so, we are confident that we play a potent force toward curating upcoming drops.
In this process, we immerse among our communities. We gain knowledge, discover new products to purchase, share opinions, and set future purchase goals.
And finally, we are presented with the drops curated by us and for us, thanks to Massdrop and their magic to work with manufacturers.

At the end of the day, drops are the center of Massdrop’s core UX. But the micro–moments of contact between these drops and users changes vastly depending on the context.
Therefore, I will first show you two unique features designed for Massdrop app.

Feature 1: Micro-Moment Cards

Drops need to have appropriate voices to speak to users depending on the context.

Micro-moments happen, according to thinkwithgoogle.com, “when people reflexively turn to a device—increasingly a smartphone—to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something.”

They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped.

These cards connect drops to users’ various intents when using Massdrop with the most relevant drop information in each micro-moment.

Feature 2: Drop Mentions

Drop mentions are inspired by how we are already talking and thinking about drops, and aims to improve that.

Massdrop users interact with drops in far more contexts beyond searches and purchases.
Drops are essential to what we talk about, a language we share in common and the central pieces that hold each community together.
This feature connects drops to how we communicate in Massdrop, make drop-centric chats easier, and ultimately creating more opportunities and motives to purchase.

Below are some key user flows to put them in action!

Community navigation

Home is the first page in community navigation. It offers a quick overview of all communities a user has joined.

This works similarly as before.

Communities a user belongs to will be shown right after Home for immediate access.

Before discovering other communities, users care more about their own communites.

Glanceable communities.

Simply swipe left and right to view another community, including communities users have not yet joined. This makes other communities visible at a glance and easily accessible.

Press More to view all communities and organize their order.

For those “I want to see Mech Keys before Audiophile” community moments, and vice versa.

Community: Discover

Ok but now I only want to browse Mech Keys content!

Once users scrolled to engage with a community’s feed, community nav will minimize itself. A drop down arrow for other communities will show up.

Featured drops, Chats now, Featured Story, and Polls now.

When users continue scrolling down, these four sections will be looped by default.

Community: Drops

Micro-moment: Top Comments.

This section is a hook with top comments from active drops to give them a voice upon contact with users. These comments could be top upvotes, curated by Massdrop staff, and replies from manufacturers.

All Active drops.

Right after top comments are all active drops, sorted by “Ending Soon” by default.

All Inactive drops.

Lastly, we have inactive drops taking in requests.

Community: Polls

Micro-moment: Community’s Choice.

It’s important to let users know their voices have been heard.Each drop will also have its related chats and polls linked in its drop page.

Community: Chats

Micro-moment: Top Mentions.

This section shows what drops are hot topics recently. Inactive drops will be featured along with active drops as long as they are the center of recent chats.

Single Chat Page

Micro-moment: Mentioned Drops.

This section gives readers an idea of what drops are being talked about in this chat. Active drops will be first in the row.

Mentions and Drop Cards

Micro-moment: Drop Cards.

When users tap on a mentioned drop, a drop card will pop up to give them some basic information and a primary call-to-action button.The layout varies for active drops, inactive drops, and products that only exist in polls.

How to Evaluate I will be sharing this design with Massdrop communities to receive feedback and criticism from them. When that’s done, I will conclude their feedback and update this post.If this design was ever implemented, some key metrics to track in order to evaluate its effectiveness would be:

Retention rate per user per week: This design for a Massdrop app should increase the total amount of users who remain active after each week, with mobile traffic being a potent force driving that growth.
User engagement metrics for drops, polls, and chats: This design should result in more engaged users actively browse, chat and participate drops.
Total purchases made per week: With above metrics improved, we should also see an increased amount of total purchases made and/or percentage of users who make purchases, with mobile purchases contributing heavily to that increase.

Next Steps This design is only the first step, with an emphasis on how navigation and browsing are optimized to fit Massdrop users.Moving forward, I am excited to learn more about Massdrop and its users and try to design features such as a Drop Calendar, Community Stories, and Glossaries.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!If you have any feedback or inquiries, please leave a comment here, tweet me @Kizeeno, or email me at kizoveen@gmail.com

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Kizoveen

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Starius

703

Sep 12, 2018

I'm all for this. One of the first things I ever did when I discovered Massdrop was to check the iOS app store and see if there was an "app" for it. I was a bit disappointed there wasn't one. I think this would be beneficial for everyone.

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JustFluxz

458

Sep 12, 2018

We need an official app for Massdrop!

Samicheaib11

Dec 23, 2016

This is amazing!! I hope it comes to life, it is so exciting

MikeMD

1100

Dec 16, 2016

Wow! Thank you for taking the time to put all of this together. It's easy to see how much thought and attention you put into these. :) Simply stunning

TheSkeleton

3134

Dec 15, 2016

I finally made it mom I made to the big leagues im in a app display (I seriously starting freaking out when I saw my self a ton) and you used my discussion too, thanks man hope it all works out :)

Kizoveen

Dec 16, 2016

TheSkeletonHahahaha I'm glad you're ok me using it :D

Branny

733

Dec 15, 2016

*Ahem*, Massdrop..... Hire this guy.

Dec 12, 2016

Dec 12, 2016

Hey Kevin,
Great work! It's awesome to see the community get behind what we are trying to build. Love the animations and overall you did a great job breaking down and explaining all the concepts. Excited to see whats next. What inspired you to work on this?

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Kaz

141

Dec 13, 2016

To long? Not at all. It's great to see members creating thoughtful content of all lengths. I think the community will respond very well to this post. It is great to see community members as passionate as us and better yet it's really cool to see how other designs solve the problems that we try to solve day in and day out. This will be a great profile piece and I myself look forward to seeing more. This was the talk of the team this morning on the Product Team.
Welcome to the mech keys community and Massdrop as a whole!