Personal Study
Goals: Modernizing the sneaker purchasing experience.
Sneakers have been a monumental part of my life - from getting me first interested in arts and design to learning about markets and economics to fostering relationships with my friends and family. This project is my idea to try and find a way to give back to the culture for the better.
Competitive Analysis
I looked at several apps, brands, and websites to summarize the general state of sneaker shopping across both experienced sneaker hobbyist and limited-knowledge buyers/average Joes:
Restocks (app)
Adidas Confirmed (app)
Goat (app)
SNKRS (app by Nike)
Nike.com (website)
Restocks
The biggest use-case of the app is undoubtedly the built-in quick buying features. Once a user enters in their credit card information and addresses, they can quickly go straight to check out with all their information filled out and ready to confirm. This functionality is extremely valuable for limited stock releases of both clothes and footwear, where entire stocks of items may sell out in a matter of seconds. For example, when Supreme released their classic 'box-logo' hoodie last December, their site received over a billion hits and requests for an item that sold out in under 30 seconds.
Upon opening the app, users are landed on a infinite newsfeed of pieces, depending on what stores/brands/items they are following. Clicking on one will bring you to a page with bigger pictures and sometimes the inventory of stock. The app also contains a marketplace for users to sell their new or used clothes and footwear to each other. The profile mimics Instagram but there is no chat functionality until a user buys another user's item, in which then the users can talk to one another for further information.
Adidas Confirmed
The Adidas Confirmed app's main use-case is to help users local to one region secure their purchase for highly limited pairs of sneakers. These regions are mainly locked to areas with flagship stores and accounts require verification through phone numbers and captchas to reduce the number of bots (automated software that can check out and submit orders many times faster than the average shopper) - although a quick GPS spoof will still let users from other regions intermingle, potentially ruining the experience for locals whose slots will be taken up by outsiders. The emergence of this app is notable because bots ruin the online shopping experience for many in order for just a few users running these bots to resell this limited supply run of product for hundreds of dollars above the MSRP. Naturally with the stakes this high then, malfunctions within the app on release dates lead to catastrophic reviews left by users who lost out and failed to secure their purchase.
In the chance that you secure a reservation, users are given a unique barcode to show when they pick up their shoe in the store and prevent other users from stealing their reservation. However, Adidas Reconfirmed fails to introduce a sense of reassurance during this process. Users are afraid of losing their reservation because Adidas says that logging out of your account once you secure a pair of shoes can remove your reservation from their system. However, come release day inside the store, you are asked to log in and out of your account because the app stops functioning at some point when opening it in the store after an employee asks to see and then scan your barcode - in reality, the employees already have a list of reservations and just need to scan your barcode for internal reasons to bring your shoes up to the register.
GOAT
Named after Michael Jordan and his legendary line of sneakers, GOAT is primarily a service that allows users to sell and buy from each other with a middleman. Buyers can be protected from purchasing fake sneakers via GOAT's authentication checks and sellers can be protected from illegitimate chargebacks from suspicious buyers. In return, when sellers must pay a small %-rate fee after they make a successful sale through the GOAT marketplace.
GOAT adds a significant value in this online sneaker marketplace by adding reassurance to both buyers and sellers with little costs to both parties: buyers may wait a few more days for shipping and validation checks, and sellers may wait a few more days for money to be deposited from GOAT to their own bank accounts and have extra security from chargebacks. Their innovation is in converting online user marketplaces like those seen on Craigslist and more recently, Facebook Marketplace, into a more standard shopping experience like actually buying directly from retailers online. You can log into the app and register your profile with specific sizes and sneaker models you might be interested in.
Nike's SNKRS and Nike.com
Nike's latest shopping app and website are the most consistent experiences across mobile and desktop environments in this list. Nike has made the product the first and most prominent focus - first opening the app or website, users are taken to a landing page with Nike's latest and greatest models, sometimes with a relevant tag-line in the corner of the product picture. Users can continue to scroll down this Instagram-style feed and explore more models and switch to feeds that show currently in-stock models or upcoming models. Clicking a shoe will bring you to a new page showcasing more pictures or other related models with relevant tags and filters.
When you are logged into the app/website, your size and payment preferences are saved so you can check out easily in just a few clicks. This is a big help on release days of a special limited-supply sneaker model - however, botting is still prominent here, with seemingly fewer checks from Nike to limit this behavior.
Solutions
After my market research, it was time to go to the drawing board. First, some markers and sticky notes - the hallmark of modern design-thinking.
Here, I start to organize the ideas from the sticky notes above and where to impact stakeholders in this space. I also created empathy maps for several key types of participants in the sneaker market - the casual, the hype(bae)sts, and the resellers.
Preliminary sketches of mobile app interfaces and screens. The goal for the mobile app experience is to make something light and clear to navigate. The last thing sneakerheads want to do during a limited release is navigate pages and pages to find the kicks they want. However, the ease of use can bring dangers like automated bots signing up for limited raffles or live releases. More research on the current functional capacity of AI and machine learning in solving random puzzles is necessary to create truly effective measures against potential bots and automation here.
Some more detailed personas and the overall userflow of Kicket covering the process of signing in to signing up for raffles, buying and selling in the market place, and searching for your favorite pairs of kicks. Some specific features like in-depth profile management, deeper transaction history reports, and more data analytics available to users are coming soon!
You can follow the userflow from left to right in this gallery or just download the PDF below.
At this time, there is a lot of space to expand the concept shown above to be a more complete mobile app experience. Better integrations with native app payments for fast checkouts, more information architecture for buyers and sellers to better price their products according to the entire market, and finding more efficient ways to enter or process checkout flows to save users time and frustrations could all help to create a powerful experience compared to the market today.