Zalander

Inspiration

Originally inspired by Zalando main app and also Tinder, that my wife won't allow me to use. Swipe for fun...

What it does

Application imitates Zalando app initialization process with an added feature of conducting flash marketing research. Mobile first!

The business values of the feature are: fast data collection of users' preferences, more items' displays (leads to higher conversion).

When the app is started, several items (marketing team decides on which) are starting to fall to the center of the screen with a high speed, persist for a short period of time, vanish. The idea is to show pictures fast, to imitate the regular way customer "scans" clothing when passing through in a real-life shop, deciding whether the item is attractive or not. User can swipe right if liked the item, and left if disliked (Tinder-like approach). Also item can be left unprocessed. After the flash research is completed, user can either continue with the app or go to a separate page with results. Results page also allows user to get forwarded to the item's main page or play again. Stats are collected for following analysis (in this prototype they are shown on a separate page).

How We built it

Simple prototype built with mentioned above technologies in a team of four developers with various backgrounds.

Challenges We ran into

Writing front-end codes is quite challenging for back-enders, it is sometime not easy to get a table for a team, agreeing on the technical aspects of the implementation might get tricky, lack of time is always there, team members' cooperation takes time, gluing the developed codes together is challenging.

Accomplishments that We are proud of

We actually have something to commit here today, quite an achievement for the first hackathon.

What We learned

Think and agree on the possible idea in advance might boost the process. More time for initial discussion is required, everyone should take part. Team needs a leader for both: technical and business (delivery) processes.

What's next for Zalander

Further marketing analysis of the data collected. Creation of the "admin" pages for easier item management. Gamification of the process by introducing competition elements. As an example, users swipes to guess the most popular items in specific category, again, the statistics are collected as well as the amount of display times raise.

If the usage of swipe gesture in a described manner will prove to be successful, then it could potentially be also introduced to main shopping-apps as a replacement for "clumsy" way of adding items to bookmarks.