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The Marketplace
A frictionless digital marketplace for college students that aims to minimize the potential for scams, has easily verifiable sellers’ information, and emphasizes media-driven product pages.
Background
With nearly 22% of all full-time students enrolled in the U.S. living in college dormitories, there are millions of students anxiously trying to get settled in before the start of the year.
Owing to:
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an abundance of scam listings,
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unverifiable sellers' credibility,
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lack of shipping options,
current marketplaces tend to increase the stresses of moving in.
Overview
The Marketplace was the culmination of a semester-long project for the "Interaction Design Studio" course, supervised by James Rampton (former Lead Product Designer, General Motors) at the University of Michigan.
Through research and anecdotal evidence, I realized that college students find it particularly stressful to make purchases on current digital marketplaces since they are typically constrained by finances (i.e., are on a tight budget) and space due to the smaller sizes of student housing.
To alleviate much of this stress, I set out to design a digital marketplace for college students to buy and sell appliances/furniture with an emphasis on minimizing scams by limiting listings to their academic institutions.
Timeline
Fall 2023
12 Weeks
UX Methods
Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Personas, Sketches, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Testing
Team
None, since this was an individual project
Project Roadmap
Having embarked on a project to identify and resolve core issues in a specific e-commerce platform scenario, I chose to use a modified version of the design thinking process as defined by the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g). This process, which is detailed below, is both hands-on and user-centric, thereby enabling me to accurately assess user needs and develop a viable potential solution.
