The Product

Covetly is an innovative app for toy, comic, and trading card collectors. It allows patrons to inventory their personal collections, check up-to-date prices of their items, and buy, sell, and trade items all on the same platform.

Nothing quite like it for toy collectors exists on the market yet, so a contract UI/UX designer there I was faced with the unique challenge of creating and testing something highly in demand and unprecedented.

The Problem

When I joined Covetly, their existing app was in need of a major overhaul. They'd determined there was huge demand for what the the app aimed to do, so with some brand new hires in place to manage the overhaul effort, I was taken on as a contract UI/UX designer to begin bringing a new vision for the platform to life.

My Role

• Full UI/UX redesign of the existing Covetly app

• Style guide changes

• Creating and implementing new app features 

• Validating app ideas through research and user testing

• Presenting design ideas and research findings to coworkers and stakeholders in a clear and concise way

• Contextual inquiry, ie. going to NY Comic Con and talking to collectors and vendors

Original App

Main UX problems with the first version of the app:

• Unclear calls to action, users confused about what to do when they get to the home page

• Confusing navigation

• Too many dead ends: things you tap on that lead to a blank or unpopulated screen

• Tinder-like trade matching: people were so inundated with matches, no trades were pursued

• Users required to manually fill in all info about collectors items they input, making item types difficult to standardize

• Bad location tracking

• Unclear what the app was user testing besides that there was a space for an app like this in the market

Main visual design issues with the app:

• Major branding and color inconsistencies, like CTA colors

• A brand green many described as “abrasive”

• Hard-to-read text over images/crowded pages

The Research

I mainly conducted researched using the following three methodologies.

Interviews

Given tight constraints of my project timeline, I sourced participants via Reddit, posting in r/FunkoPup with a clear ask.

Commenters were really excited to hear about an app focused on their favorite collectible; several users agreed to video interview sessions that lasted about 45 minutes a session on average, and one even came to our WeWork space to chat with us.

Contextual Inquiry

Our team went to New York Comic Con to get into the headspace of collectors and interview several.

And maybe had some fun too.

Explored Collecting on the Web

Facebook groups, trading card apps, collector forums, collectible selling and trading sites, etc.

Messed up my web ads for months.

Main Takeaways

There really wasn’t an app like this on the market yet, and potential users shared that they could really see the benefit of having one and were excited to try it.

Goals of our users:

• Inventory their personal collection (number of items, if they have multiples, how many in a specific character or category do they have, etc.) 

• Know the most up-to-date prices of their items

• Find out the worth of their entire collection

• Have a community collectors to chat with online

• Be able to buy/sell/trade their collections easily

Biggest pain points collectors previously encountered:

• Checking the current market prices of their items was super complicated

• They collected multiple types of items, and either had nowhere to inventory them or multiple platforms to do it on

• They had many places online to gather with other collectors, but these forums weren’t specialized or customizable for their needs

• Buying, selling, and trading items requires extensive text entry and planning

Key Challenges

Our constraints:

• Most of the app would be built in an interface builder application by a coworker, so my interfaces would have to be as simple as possible.

• Our extremely tight deadlines wouldn’t allow us to make buying, selling, and trading a first-iteration priority

• This app was unprecedented in the collector marketplace, making research and finding inspiration more difficult

• Very little time to test and conduct research to along the way

Brain-storms / Sketches

Brainstorming features and optimizing time by figuring out what I’d be able to build quickly that was worth testing with our users from the beginning.

The Solution

Improved Navigation

A navigation bar and flow that took into account both our top user priorities and top priorities as a growing business and platform.

Simple Collectible Adding

Several ways to add collectibles without having to input text. The tap-to-add feature I came up with for my interview was used for over 60% of item adds.

Simple Check-Ins

Users could now see the value of their entire collection by simply logging into the app, as well as full numeric breakdowns of each type of collectible you have.

Scalable Design System

A modular design that would allow for new features to be added and tested easily and a few future iterations already built and ready to go.

The Screens

Many of the below screens were published and tested in the redesigned app.

Interface Builder, used by our front-end dev, allowed the team to quickly launch features and reach our product goals—the tradeoff being design flexibility and customization.

Homepage

Add Item to Inventory

Item Details

User Profile

Buying, Selling, and Trading Exploration

A potential future phase.

The Results

Two months after launch, over 90% of people who saw this in the app store were downloading it. Users loved how simple it was to add their huge collections to the app, and we had several reviewers asking when the module for their collectibles of choice would be released.

Future Steps

New Collector Modules

We had started with Pop Funko figurines, for testing, and now had several other types of collectors items to add to the app. The most complicated one would be Comic Books.

Buying / Selling / Trading

Highly-anticipated features and a huge undertaking that we explored several ways to execute, but they had to take a backseat to getting people’s collections onto the app.

Collector Forum

As a company that revolved around collectibles in NYC, we were able to gather people for fun “Trade Nights” occasionally. A big aim for the app was to turn it into digital version of those—a place people can gather and talk about and trade collectibles regardless of their favorite ones.