Project Overview

Main Issues

For most students, it's their first time living out on their own and they are looking for cost effective ways to comfortably live in college. However, here are the main issues they face in their quest to cut costs.

Asking for Help

‍Many students are struggling financially and don't want to ask for help because they fear being a burden.

Feeling Guilty

Students who have an excess of unused products felt guilty wasting it when they had to throw resources out.

Feeling Unsafe

‍Students reported that they were less willing to receive and offer help because they were worried for their safety.

Our Goal

Find ways to create safer spaces for college students to exchange goods and reduce wastes?

Final Design

Our solution was to combine a digital and physical approach in order to create a selling experience that was unique, but prioritize anonymity and safety.

1

Seller and Buyer communicate and agree upon a price on the mobile app.

2

Seller goes to a location on campus to drop off the item with an attendant.

3

Attendant inspect the item to make sure it's in the quality as described by the post.

4

After inspection, attendant places the item in a locker.

5

Buyer receives a QR code for picking up the item.

6

Buyer heads to campus to pick up their new item

Identity Protection

By using the student’s UC Net ID to log onto Mutual.ly, the product is ensuring that every user is university affiliated, eliminating risk of privacy concerns.

The user is also able to browse and use the app in an anonymous mode, to protect their identity from potential scams, dangers, and suspicions.

Contactless Transaction

Items and action buttons are displayed in cards on the home page.

The user is able to scan a unique QR code to pick up an item, making this a contactless transaction, protecting both identities and maintaining safety.

Sell and Buy

Selling and buying excess and secondhand items is streamlined with tags and simple upload process.

The user is able to browse for items they may need that another student is done using. With this, we can hope to eliminate wasting valuable resources that could instead be recycled.

User Flow

Research

Methodologies

Literature Review

As a first step in the design process, we reviewed An Ethnographic Study of an Online, Mutual-Aid Health Community: Group dynamics, roles, and relationships to understand and learn more about existing solutions. This article helped our team formulate ideas and plan how to approach our research process; for example, conducting social network analysis to better understand the user.

Competitive Analysis

Limitations for Competitors

Safety

Many students felt concern for their safety when they had to meet with 3rd party sellers/ buyers. They never knew who they would be meeting up with because people could have fake profiles.

Credibility

Scamming is a major problem when buying or selling from a 3rd party. Many of these services had little to no verification system that would allow users to easily check a person's credibility.

User Research

What we were trying to learn.

• How do you go about asking for help when something is inaccessible or something is unfamiliar to you?

• How important is anonymity to you when you are receiving or giving help?

• What type of barriers do you face when you ask for help or receiving help

What did we do?

I conducted 2 out of the 10 in-depth user interviews to gather feedback from students about their experiences with how they seek and offer help to one another.
18 questions in total
8 contextual questions
10 questions based on current experiences and emotions using current products

Who did we ask?

Synthesize

As a team, we completed an affinity map exercise to draw connections and create insights from our user interviews.
From these findings, our team decided to create a platform and a physical product.

Key Insights

Meet Emma Jansen

We created a user persona that is representative of the audience we want to reach through our application: a UCI student who would benefit from a little bit of extra help. We wanted to synthesize the needs of our user and form a better connection with a user we would be designing this app for.

Storyboarding

I worked on creating the story board to convey how our users would feel and how our selling platform worked. I wanted to showcase how people would sell and receive their items.

Design

As our product will ultimately utilize both digital and physical platforms, we decided to focus on producing a digital prototype of our mobile app for now.

Wireframes

This is the login page. I included an option to not sign in, and remain as a browsing user.

This would be the dashboard where at a glance, the user can see what there is up for sale or for rent.

When they click on the bulletin board, they get led to the page with many posts, where users can scroll down like a news feed.

Users can look find out more information about the product that they're interested in.

The What’s New page looks like the instgram discover page, where people can scroll through new posts.

This is a message thread. This will allow users to contact the seller and learn more about the products.

The search page allows users to find items and sellers via keywords and names.

Profile will include all saved,  settings, and what the user has posted as well.

Early Digital Prototype

How We're Addressing Safety ⚠️

Login
Currently, it will ensure that the buyer or seller is part of the UCI community. Once expanded, it will ensure that it's part of the same institution

Rating
Ratings allow the buyer to feel more safe about making a transaction with a seller by giving a visual indication on how well people's experiences have been with a particular seller.

Anonymous Mode
Anonymous mode allows a user to buy or sell as discreetly as possible. It hides usernames and names and shows an autogenerated number to tie the buyer or seller back to the transaction. This will allow the user to shop and sell without disclosing their information to a stranger.

How We're Addressing Help 🤝 and Guilt 😞

Dashboard
The dashboard allows users to easily scroll through eh catalogue of items being sold. This will allow students to help one another without feeling like a burden.

Search/ Filter
The search functionality allows users to find products that they're looking for in a quick manner using key words and filters to hone in on the products they want for the price they want.

Profile
The profile page will allow users to find other products that a user may need. This can help them because a buyer may be familiar with a seller and want to buy more from them.

Creating a Post
Creating a sale post allows sellers to feel less guilty about getting rid of their stuff because they aren't wasting excess products. They are up cycling and repurposing their old products.

User Testing

After creating a potential high-fidelity prototype, we conducted user testing and made changes based on user feedback to ensure that our prototype was intuitive and easy to use. User testing was conducted with five different UCI students, who were familiar with UCI For Sale Facebook Pages, FreshHub, and other second-hand selling sites.

Main Goals

We wanted our users to be able to go through 3 primary processes:

Buying/ Picking out Products

Selling/Dropping off Products

Protecting their Anonymity

Users were sent a Figma link to the prototype and observed as they walked through five tasks:

Tasks

1. Login

2. Turn on anonymous mode

3. Navigate dashboard and buy an item

4. Navigate dashboard and buy an item

5. Getting ready to pick up an item

Insight

From the user testing conducted, we learned:

• When buying an item, users were able to successfully request to buy the item, but struggled initially with navigating to the product page to find more information about the product.

• When anonymous mode was turned on, users were unable to complete the task of buying an item because the product card on the dashboard was no longer clickable or interactive.

• Users felt that the application features and tasks were mostly intuitive and straightforward, and were only confused when the prototype lacked interactivity or did not work properly.

Design Changes

Once we gained insights from the results of the user testing, we decided to go through our prototype once again to fix any missing or incorrect interactions that may have resulted in confusion and lack of interactivity for the user.
We fixed the connections between anonymous mode and buying an item, so now the user will easily be able to navigate to the product page to find more information about the product by clicking on the product's card on the main dashboard.
We also added a notification tab to allow the users to better manage what they were buying and selling.

Reflection

What's next for Mutual.ly?

Wanna see more?