For this project, my team and I wanted to improve the experience of buying and selling used items locally in metropolitan areas. Our user group were young people (ages 18-35) who lived in or near major cities. We found that our users had issues with convenience, safety, and trust in item integrity. We decided to address these concerns in our design.

My Team

Nia Lindsey, Anna Malecki, Whitney Nelson, Andy Zhou

My Role

In the research phase, I synthesized the findings from the competitive analysis that we conducted, contributed survey questions and conducted two semi-structured interviews.

​In the analysis phase, I contributed to building our affinity diagrams and generating design criteria.

​In the design phase, I participated in our multiple brainstorming sessions. I made mock-ups and storyboards for one of our design alternatives. I also helped design and create our prototype in Sketch and add functionality in InVision.

​In the evaluation phase, I helped create our evaluation plan and tasks. I also recruited participants for evaluation.

Research Methods

Competitive Analysis

​We completed a competitive analysis by looking at existing solutions and identifying issues current users have with these systems.

We were able to learn more about the existing solutions on the market that attempts to solve user need and pain points we found so that we could better estimate our problem space.

Preliminary Semi-Structured Interviews

​We conducted preliminary interviews with 5 participants in our user group, utilizing convenience sampling. Our goal was to learn more about their online shopping experiences, their preferences, and pain points. We analyzed the data using qualitative coding to find recurring themes related to user pain points. Three major themes included convenience, safety, and anonymity.

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From our research, we hypothesized that our potential problem areas for users might be safety and anonymity. We created a survey to capture info such as demographics, likert scale questions to quantify feelings and desires, and a qualitative portion for users to identify what's important to them. We also allowed users to leave their emails if they were willing to participate in follow-up interviews. Our survey was distributed via:

Reddit.com

Facebook.com

iMessage/Text

GroupMe

Tumblr.com

We utilized both snowball and convenience sampling to get participants. We chose a survey to see what the major concerns were for our user group. We used the survey information to further narrow our user group and prove, disprove and formulate problem areas. The survey essentially allowed us to figure out what users problem areas/areas of interest are.​

Out of 68 responses we got from the survey, some important finding are

• Most people who buy and sell used items locally online are 18 - 34 years old and lives in metropolitan or suburban area.

• People are neutral about anonymity when buying or selling used items.

• People generally feels safe about meeting up buyer or seller.

• People think shipping the item and meeting locally are two most convenient way to sell and buy used item.

We analyzed the qualitative portion of our survey using qualitative coding. We let the data speak for itself by initially reading through the qualitative responses, we then generated codes for the most commonly referenced ideas. After matching each qualitative answer to a code, we performed a total code count. We used the top referenced codes as major themes in our research and used them to drive our interview question design process. These major themes are convenience, safety, and trust.

We generated task analyses for both buyers and sellers so that we could better understand our user’s processes and needs. We used these task analyses to inform our design generation.

We created personas representative of our users to better understand their needs and motivations.

As a team we also created design criteria based on our user needs and prioritized them to better guide our design process.

Within our user group we identified a problem space related to user safety, quality, convenience and trust. To address these issues we aimed to conceive and refine as many design ideas as possible. To achieve this, we first analyzed interview data we gathered in D1 by creating an affinity map.

After creating the affinity map, we “walked the wall” and generated design ideas for the high level sticky notes we produced. We produced more design ideas by brainstorming as a team. We took the major themes from the affinity map and systematically brainstormed different design ideas for each major theme within time constraints. These ideas included both granular features and large concept ideas that would address issues within our problem space

Synthesis of Findings

​After aggregating all the data we have gathered, we were able to identify all the user need and pain points, user’s altitude of the entire process of buying and selling used items locally online. We also identified 3 major themes: safety, item integrity and convenience. To present our data, we created persona for both of our user groups, which also helped us better emphasize with our users.

Challenges

Design Iterations

From all of our design ideas we chose high level concepts that could be translated into an overall design concept for our problem space(s). We sketched these concepts individually then came back as a team to discuss our sketches and the overall concepts we wanted to select as our top 3. We broke apart again to further develop sketches for our top 3 concepts and came back together to discuss any new or different ideas and perspectives. We then went through each design idea and sketched as a team and discussed the overall concepts for our high-level design ideas to further for further refinement