Our goal is to help people who are struggling with unrestrained online shopping reclaim control over their digital consumerism.

📌 TL;DR – our baseline study 

We conducted initial interviews and baseline diary studies with nine participants, finding that unplanned buying usually occurred when people:

• had already invested significant time in and accumulated buying desire via window shopping, to the point that browsing fatigue and genuine desire for products they’ve seen kick in to trigger a purchase
• derive positive emotion from shopping, finding great enjoyment in exploring a wide selection, discovering novel items, and making selections
• needed to utilize the convenience of online ordering in time-sensitive situations – this mostly happens with over-reliance on spontaneous DoorDash orders

A tale of three personas

We identified three distinct personas that captured underlying commonalities and differences amongst our study participants – a socialite, a spender, and a busy bee.

🥂 Sam the Socialite 

Sam spends a disproportionate amount of time indulging in online window shopping and purchases, which isn’t a surprise given they’re inundated with social triggers to shop (many of which they’ve opted into) – i.e., posts from influencers they follow, their friends’ fits, and online store tabs they never close from their browser. They want to reinvest time into more meaningful activities but struggles to do so because online shopping remains socially fruitful and pleasurable.

Though pleasurable in the moment, online shopping is ultimately mentally and emotionally draining for Sam. On the surface, the triggers that get them from one online shopping stage to the next are ads, testimonials, and stock warnings. But as we dug deeper, we noticed that their journey is really driven by the frantic pursuit of emotional and mental satisfaction. 

💳 Spencer the Spender 

While Spencer is able to exercise impressive self-restraint in daily responsibilities, when it comes to online shopping, they feel an impulsive itch to order anything deemed suitable for their lush lifestyle. Spencer is a fan of well-designed items and finds comfort in materialism. However, they feel burdened by these desires and experience guilt when they spend money on such items, thereby entertaining this bad habit. Spencer’s primary goal is to think more critically about their purchases to reduce expenditure on unnecessary purchases.

With many touchpoints, it’s difficult for Spencer to escape the introduction of new goods and services, whether from influencers’ social media, targeted advertisements, or identifying new items they need when assessing their belongings. The process of browsing and imagining their life with new items is exhilarating for Spencer, and that dopamine release when purchasing an item keeps them in the seemingly unbreakable cycle. Dissecting this behavioral pattern deeper, we found vital interception points where there are opportunities to divert impulses.

 

🐝 Bash the Busy Bee

Bash is a graduate student who is constantly busy with classwork, grading, research, and meetings. As a result, they rarely have enough time to cook their own meals and find themselves ordering food on DoorDash frequently.

Bash’s list of TODOs grows as the day progresses from morning to evening (circular experience map). When dinner time comes, Bash still has many outstanding TODO items. They go through an emotional cycle of low stress in the mornings, high stress near dinnertime, and feelings of relief and guilt after ordering on Doordash. Ordering on DoorDash is primarily motivated by convenience to parallelize other tasks and finish their work.

🛣️ Priority personas as we forge ahead

Most of our study participants fell under the “Sam the Socialite” and “Spencer the Spender” personas, so we decided to prioritize them.

Though these personas were distinct, they also converged on motivational, environmental, and behavioral aspects. They both:

1. Are driven by an insatiable desire for new items (and lose track of their online consumption)
2. Find the social triggers to shop that they’re surrounded by irresistible
3. Derive instant pleasure from the online shopping experience, but that pleasure is later offset by a sobering realization that online shopping has undermined a deeper personal goal

Their main differentiator was on what aspect of their behavior they hoped to change – 

Sam the Socialite wanted to spend less time browsing online stores whereas Spencer the Spender wanted to spend their money more judiciously online.

However, these goals aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive – after all, online browsing is often a requisite for online spending. In addition, due to our limited participant pool, an instance of one of our nine participants mentioning one goal but not another doesn’t mean all users of that persona would strictly desire one purpose and not the other.

Because of the many overlapping attributes, we chose to keep both personas in mind when designing future intervention studies.