RU Marketplace

RU Marketplace is aimed to provide a platform for students to buy and resell used items.

Role: UX Designer

Designed an end-to-end product, including user research, user interviews, competitive analysis, user flows, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing.

Project Interests

This project was a different experience for team collaboration. Through the process, I discovered my strengths in conducting user research and identified areas where I can improve, such as visual design. In addition, my previous work on a thrifting application proved highly beneficial in this project, as I had conducted extensive research on the reselling market and its trends. This knowledge allowed our team to concentrate on the right areas during user research, resulting in a more focused and productive outcome.

Overview

RU Marketplace is a group project in which I worked on a new feature designed to be implemented in the existing Rutgers University application, aimed to provide a platform for students to buy and resell used items. The case study elaborates on the design process of the application.

Problem

Students today are trying to be creative in how they make money. However, long hours spent studying, participating in class, and working part-time will only partially sustain a student's expenses. As a result, many have turned to consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce markets in the United States to sell items they no longer need to make a quick few bucks. But, these reselling applications are not completely transparent and trustworthy; many scams start from the listings, communication, and bots creating fake listings to make traffic to the site.

Design Process

We aimed to improve transparency and trust within a product; we followed user-centered design thinking to build a solution where students have an easy-to-use and convenient interface and can feel safer using it.

Competitive Analysis

We started our research by conducting a competitive analysis as we wanted to understand what other applications provide, their strengths, and where they lack so that when we conduct our user interviews, we can clearly understand what the users have felt using their applications. We focused on the market's three trending applications: Poshmark, AptDeco, and OfferUp.

Target Audience

We targeted the Rutgers community who want to buy or sell products to earn extra cash. Many students are looking for affordable products, and our feature allows them to buy at prices lower than retail. We understand that many students have had bad experiences with mobile reselling applications, and our focus is on transparency to eliminate those experiences. We aim to provide a safe and authentic buying and reselling experience that users can trust. As we cater specifically to Rutgers students, we prioritize making the interface user-friendly and helping them with their move-in or move-out. We aim to create a transparent platform that promotes a positive experience and builds trust between buyers and sellers.

Research Methods and Methodologies

After understanding the different functionalities of the market competitors, we started focusing on our potential users; we wanted to understand their experiences, needs, and pain points to design a transparent user experience for Rutgers students. We used different methods to gather as much information as possible to design better. We finalized two research methods as our primary sources of information. They are:

Ethnographic Research: This approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of the culture and experiences of the student population. The ethnographic approach involves:

Spending time with the students on campus.
Engaging in conversations to gain insight into their experiences.

Using an ethnographic approach, we gained a deeper understanding of the student culture at Rutgers, including their challenges, the support systems available to them, and the factors that influence their experiences within the campus community. Using this information, we can improve students' reselling experiences.

Qualitative Research: Using user interviews as a qualitative method, we conducted three in-depth, one-on-one conversations with Rutgers students to gain insights into their thoughts, opinions, and experiences related to a reselling product or service. This information was then used to inform decision-making and identify improvement areas.

User Interviews

After conducting a pilot interview, we conducted three more interviews using a scripted introduction to add structure to the process. This approach helped build trust between the researcher and subject, as they knew what to expect and felt more comfortable with the process. In addition, follow-up questions were asked to extract more detail from the subject, resulting in a thorough and detailed analysis.

Insights

Safety measures need to be increased to reduce the risk of scams. This would give users greater peace of mind and allow them to transact confidently.
Users value transparency in their transactions, so more information should be provided about the products and services offered.
Communication through mobile marketplace apps should be easy without spam, allowing for efficient and effective communication between buyers and sellers. Addressing these areas makes the mobile marketplace experience more enjoyable and user-friendly.

Interpretation sessions

Once we had all the information we needed to gather from the users, we started to synthesize the information to understand what the users had gone through in their experiences. First, we had a group interpretation session to break down all the information into different sections and organize them into meaningful groups to focus on different areas.

Affinity Mapping is a great process to help organize large amounts of data. Next, our team took all the feedback from our interview sessions and listed all the insights gathered. The grouped items were then assigned a theme. This process enabled our team to understand the true pain points of our users and allowed us to select which areas to address first easily.

Finally, to help us understand the user's day-to-day life better and help us empathize with them, and know where and how our application will help them we created a Journey map. This helped us make the design decisions and add features to make their day-to-day life easier.

As a final step in synthesizing our research and to put a face to our targeted user groups who would potentially be using the application, we created three User Personas. Each of them established different user personalities, ensuring we were designing our larger user groups.

Product Concepts from Visioning Session

With our research in place, we started brainstorming how we could help and make the student's life easier by making some extra cash and reselling their unused items; we came up with the idea of integrating and implementing a feature in the existing Rutgers app called the RU Marketplace.

RU Marketplace is aimed to provide a platform for students to buy and resell used items.
The feature will offer an easy-to-use and convenient interface for students to browse and purchase a wide range of pre-owned items such as textbooks, electronics, clothing, and furniture.
With a focus on facilitating transactions within the Rutgers community, RU Marketplace will provide a secure and reliable platform for students to conduct transactions while reducing the environmental impact of discarding usable items.
As a result, the RU Marketplace could enhance student life and promote sustainability at Rutgers University.

We started sketching the designs during our visioning session and finalized the features we would have in the product. We aimed to keep the features simple and intuitive for the students as we wanted to achieve transparency within the application.

This was the design we finalized during our session, and our next step was to answer a few questions to ensure that our design aligned with what we tried to achieve. Some of the questions were:

Does this design support anytime, anywhere access? Where and when does the user access technology?

The RU Marketplace design supports access at any time or place. For example, users access technology on the train, in their dorms, or off campus.

How can users start an activity on one device and then resume it later, at the same point, on another device?

The users' NetId activity will be saved to their profile, which can be accessed through any device.

What is the user doing that they might share with others, considering information and activities? What can you provide to help them have more things to share and talk about? Remember to support trusted advisors.

Items can be shared through the messenger to other NetId. There will also be a shared button to share on social media.

Eliminate any need for users to read the documentation—they won't anyway.

The product will not have complicated documentation other than access to their information to be shown to the buyer or the seller. This will be made sure to be worded in the user's language.

Design Models

Once we finalized our designs, we wanted to focus on product navigation and hierarchy. As we wanted to achieve an intuitive product, navigation is the core of making it intuitive because when the users know their way in and out, they want to keep coming to the product. So, we started with the flow chart to finalize the navigation within the product and created a sitemap to define the hierarchy within the application.

We created a sitemap to help us organize the unique features that RU Marketplace offers in a clear and structured format. This will also help us design the prototype for navigation and features.

Finally, to guide us in building the application without any struggle, we created a User Environment Design to give an overview of what each feature within the application will offer. It will also help us speed up the designing phase.

Prototype

After building the product's core, navigation, and hierarchy, we started visualizing our final product. First, we started with the low-fidelity wireframes to help us think through activities, strategies, and situations from different perspectives a user will use our application. Each of us took a part of the application as we had limited time, we separated the process into

Process of Navigation
Process of Buying
Process of Selling

Then we converted the low-fidelity wireframes into high-fidelity mockups. As we had everything in place, our process was much easier compared to finalizing the wireframes in the first place. Our style resembles the Rutgers app, so we only spent a little time on the visual design and started the high-fidelity prototype right after the wireframes.

Usability Testing

We conducted usability testing with three participants over Zoom; the testing was conducted in a scripted manner. The aim was to find the navigation easy and user-friendly; users should feel transparent while using the application.

The usability test was a success, and we achieved transparency in the application, as the users specifically mentioned this during our test. However, we had minor issues with the application which we redesigned after our test.

User Quotes:

"I have always felt a little hesitant when using a reselling application to sell any item because I thought I would somehow end up scammed. It's good that you're focusing on a product specifically for Rutgers students. I feel the transparency within the application as I know what I am doing in each process"

"This is a great platform for students to feel safe when buying and selling items within the Rutgers community. It is an enhancement feature for the current Rutgers application.”

Conclusion

In our efforts to implement RU Marketplace, we emphasized ensuring that the product fosters transparency and trust between buyers and sellers, providing a safe and enjoyable experience for all users. Given that the application is only available to the Rutgers community, students are likely to trust the product, knowing it has been created to meet their specific needs.

In addition to these successes, we are committed to continuously improving the product to ensure that it meets the evolving needs of the Rutgers community. By prioritizing transparency, trust, and usability, we are confident that RU Marketplace will become a valuable tool for students, providing a platform for sustainable and affordable transactions within the Rutgers community.