Change — Buy and Sell Books at College

This is the story for my capstone project at Coursera Interaction Design
University of California, San Diego.

In the capstone project, there are three directions we could choose — time, change and glance. I chose change. The mission is to design an interface that facilitates personal or social behavior change. When I started this project, it was almost the end of my fall school semester. Usually that is the time when students at my college (College of St. Scholastica (CSS), Duluth, MN) sending out tons of emails everyday trying to buy and/or sell books for next semester.

Personally, I do not like this way of communication. Picture that you receive over 20 emails by the end of the day, and probably there are books you need, but you just too tired to read all the emails.

So that was my initial idea — to change the behavior of students at CSS buying and/or selling books.

The app will allow the user to complete some basic tasks such as searching, browsing, selling and buying books. One feature is that the user could bargain if he wants a lower price, and the seller could change (or not change) the price accordingly. The seller also can view his books on shelf, or take them off if he no longer wants to sell them. The user should be able to connect their school account to this app, and add payment methods (credit cards, debit cards or account balance) to receive the payment and/or pay for the book.

I got some design insights from Amazon app on iTunes.

Just like Amazon app, the left side will have thumbnails of books, following by its title, course title, and price marked in blue on the right.

After the first prototype, I asked my roommates to try out. One great feedback was that they suggest there is an initial screen that could let the student choose their major(s) (or subjects), because there is little chance that they need to buy books of another major. So my A/B user testing was on whether include a major choosing initial screen will be better or not.

To my surprise, participants did not have a huge preference between two types. Type B (with major selections) was more convenient, but it actually added more steps if the user would like to view books from another subject. They have to add other majors and browse the book again. They prefer to use the search function. However, I did not make it clear whether the search function is only searching books from their selected subjects or the whole database. In the final result, the search function should be able to search from all the database, not limited to the user’s selections.
In the final result I will choose to use type B to allow users select their majors. Because most of the time other subjects’ books are not important or necessary to them. In addition, the major list is from A — Z. If their major(s) is almost at the end of the select list, it causes more time and effort for them to browse books every time. So choosing major at the starting point is necessary to save users’ time and effort.

Some future improvements could be, adding school theme color to it. Students would like to feel the school spirit and customize it.