My First UX Journey — Motorbike Marketplace Ecosystem

7 min readMay 16, 2019

Become a solo fighter in a small start-up company to create and designing an app from scratch while having only a little experience in this field is so challenging and exciting yet so nerve-wracking.

Worked alongside the company’s CEO who is also the Product Manager had given me many insights from a business and product perspective while building the apps. Meanwhile, for the UX part, I always explore the way to catch up with the flow of the company to give the best for the company.

Motoran

Motoran is an app that dreams to make an ecosystem between motorbike riders, dealers, workshops, and every actor around it. To achieve that big dream, Motoran took the first step to solve the current major issue about motorbike in Indonesia. Motoran first step is to become a platform for people who want to buy or sell a used motorbike. That makes the current main users of Motoran is soon-to-be or current motorbike’s owners and showroom’ dealers.

Here in this article, I will share a brief process of building the main feature of Motoran Buyer Apps’ current interface, which is the process of buying a motorcycle with multiple choice of payment.
With the time span for each product sprint was 1 or 2 weeks, the methodology that I used are:
1. Define — Goals, Information Structure
2. Research phase — User Research, Competitive Analysis
3. Analysis — Persona, User Journey
4. Ideation — Sketch, Wireframe and Prototype, Internal Testing
5. Evaluate — User Interview

But of course, the current Motoran’s app is built after multiple product sprints and multiple iterations, even 1 time we change the whole flow. And finally, we can find the most suitable flow for now by getting a successful transaction in the application.

Research Phase

User Research

At first, for this feature, we conducted interviews with users that we signified as buyers. And we found that buyers tend to have trust issue on buying used motorcycles online and rather buy it directly at the dealer by going to the showroom or buy it from relatives. Since it is a used item with a high price, they don't dare to put the high risk. There are so many victims where they bought used motorcycle from online, and they got scammed by getting junk motorcycle.

10 out of 10 users that we interviewed only agreed to buy used motorcycle after see it directly in order to prevent the risk being scammed.

From the dealers, we found that even though almost most of them use OLX, most of them not tech-savvy.

Competitive Analysis

Then I did a competitor analysis of direct and indirect competitors, such as OLX, mobil123.com, garasi.id, droom, Carro, Tokopedia, Bukalapak, and some other apps that have transaction flow. We were surprised that most of them (Applications with the same kind of business flow in Indonesia)only become the platform between dealers and buyers to find each other, there is no transaction platform. Knowing the condition that we found about the buyers, we assume that might be the reason.

From indirect competitors, we find that after they make a purchase, the buyers only get information about their current status of the transaction. So all the action needed is done all by sellers.

Analysis Phase

Problem Statement

Buyers need a way to have secure payment while still be able to see the motorcycle that they will purchase first.

Persona

From the research, I created a persona, Andre

User Journey

To better understand Andre’s current approach to solving this problem, the user journey will help how he may do a transaction online.

Ideation

The perks of worked alone as UX in this company is I can do things my way. So rather than spend time sketching so many alternative solutions, I spend time to asked so many detail things or research from other apps first to understand more and be able to become one as the buyers, therefore I believe I can give the best solutions. While in this phase, I always discussed a lot with the PM, and in this phase, we decide on Feature Prioritisation and User Flow.

Feature Prioritisation

It was important to decide the priority of the feature, where we decide what is essential for the user to have as opposed to just nice to have and the other is what kind of feature will be time-consuming and difficult to produce. Because we are only a small team with a fast-paced work environment, we focused on the solutions that were going to be feasible for our team whilst also having the highest impact on the user’s ability to achieve their goal.

The ideas we prioritized were:

To have a survey stage to see the motorcycle directly while still being monitored in the application by Motoran
To have multiple choice of payment that will facilitate the buyer so they can end their transaction in the application
To have a loan credit simulation so they can calculate and make a consideration about their purchase
To have the additional benefit that the buyer will get if doing purchase through application, so they will finish their purchase in the application

User Flow and Paper Sketch

I wanted to ensure that this was not a time-consuming phase by did the rough sketch while having a discussion. Based on the user journey, we found that it will waste of time if Andre wanted to buy a motorcycle by loan credit and he has to visit the showroom twice, just because he has to wait for the result of the credit loan survey first and come back again if he got accepted. Therefore, to simplify the process, we put the credit simulation on the detail’ vehicle and checkout page, then on the checkout page, he can choose the payment he wanted. If he chooses loan credit, he can proceed to submit his data to be surveyed first, so he can visit the showroom after he successfully gets loan credit and go back with the motorcycle he wants in 1 visit.

Then, since there was always price negotiation between dealers and buyers, we made the buyer can input the price they asked, and wait for dealers' approval.

We have found that the dealers are not tech-savvy, so we put all action buttons and all progress in the buyers' app. And with this, we also believe we can filter out the buyer who has no real intention to buy.

Wireframe and Prototype

After done with the sketch, I move on to make the wireframe and prototype in Sketch. Since most of the content has text in it, I directly made it with a high fidelity format.

Whilst compiling the finding from both our users, we understood more and found a lot of lacked information about how the process should be online. From the buyers, we found that they think the process negotiation kind of not important and a waste of time. And with dealers’ lack of capability with the application will become the blocker in the process. We also found that the motorcycle list in the application has a possibility to be sold out because the dealers have not updated the list.

From the dealers, we got feedback that many buyers who want to purchase with full payment will come with full cash and prefer not to do the payment via transfer.

(Left to Right) First payment screen and iterated screen after got feedback from users

For the progress order page, buyers quite difficult to catch up with their progress. It was unclear which have done which have not. So, I changed the design of the progress page to the design where they can see the whole process of the transaction and know their current status.