Circle
Design a tool to help international students share household items.
Project overview
When international students are ready to go back to their home countries or to work elsewhere, they need to handle a lot of household goods. They need a tool to help transfer these items to the students who need them. Circle's primary target users include students who are new to a school or moving and need to purchase home furnishings. Students who are graduating and want to transfer their unused furniture and home furnishings.
Project name
Circle
iOS
Duration
2022.05 - 2022.06
(2 months)
Role
UX Designer
Responsibilities
User Research, wireframing, prototyping, usability studies
Understanding the user
I conducted interviews to understand the users I am designing for and their needs. Most interview participants reported feeling badly about throwing away unused items that were still usable, but they didn’t actively try to transfer these items. The feedback received through research made it clear that users would be open and willing to share unused items to reduce waste, if they had access to an easy-to-use tool to help guide them.
The problem
International students share information about unused items mainly through group chats and forums. As a result, the information can only be spread in a small area. Most of these group chats do not have a fixed topic, and information about items can be quickly overwhelmed by others.
The goal
Design an application to help transfer unused household items safely and smoothly between international students.
Persona
Problem statement
Zhang is an international student who needs a tool to transfer unused furniture and household items because it feels wasteful to dispose of these usable items as garbage.
Problem statement
Qian is a fresh graduate student in the Department of Environment. She needs to buy some necessities and furniture because she is moving out of the student residence and renting her apartment.
Starting the design
Ideation
I did a quick ideation exercise (Crazy 8) to come up with ideas for how to address gaps identified in the competitive services. I drafted some paper wireframes about the main flow of the app, ensured that the elements that made it to digital wireframes would be well-suited to address user pain. I tried different layouts and put them together to see how they worked together.
Stars were used to mark the elements of each sketch that would be used in the initial digital wireframes.
Digital wireframes
Using the completed set of digital wireframes, I also created a low-fidelity prototype. So the prototype could be used in a usability study.
Usability study
I conducted two rounds of usability studies. Findings from the first study helped guide the designs from wireframes to mockups. The second study used a high-fidelity prototype and revealed what aspects of the mockups needed refining.
Profile Info
People want to access the seller's profile before they send a request
Tracking the status
People have difficulty tracking the status of a transaction
Clear indication
People prefer a clear indication of when a request has been accepted
Refining the design
Fundations
Muckups
Prototype
I created mockups in Figma and then converted them to a high-fidelity prototype.
Going forward
What I learned
Focusing on specific user needs
I learned that while I limited my target users to a certain range, focusing on specific user needs and through each step of the design process helped me come up with solutions that may apply to a large-scale problem.
Choose the right font
For this design, I chose the iOS system font SF. By learning how to use this font, I learned that there are two categories of SF fonts, Text and Display. The correct use of them can improve the readability.
Next steps
Provide incentives and rewards for users who successfully share items. Optimize the designs to fit specific user needs of each device and screen size.