Monet: Garage Sale Helper

Introducing Monet, Garage Sale Helper
Named after Moneta, Roman goddess of memory

Buyers: Discover the hidden gem and the story behind it.
Sellers: Plan, prepare, promote and post your best garage sale yet. Keep track of your inventory, organize a checklist, promote an item, and keep in contact all a touch away from your home screen.

Task

Preparing your own garage sale is often a daunting task. It’s also difficult for potential buyers to discover your merchandise. Design an experience that makes it easier for sellers to intelligently inventory their goods, and helps bargain hunters find the needle in a haystack.

Requirements

• A low-fidelity overview of the product or feature. Sketches, wireframes, site maps, and concept models are all acceptable in describing your solution
• A high-fidelity mockup for one screen, widget or interaction

1. Research & Analyze

I researched what makes a garage sale successful from both the sellers and buyers starting with an searching online and interviewing friends. I interviewed Emma, who helps her community and family organize garage sales since she was nine, and Josh, who hunts for great deals at consignment stores and yard sales. Both are in their twenties and use mobile apps frequently.

“Neighborhood sales are the best. You get to know your neighbors through their knick knacks.” -Emma

Insight: Community is important to discovering and hosting great sales.
Design: Conversations are easily navigable from the drawer. They are tabulated between individual and group contacts, integrated with promotional opportunities.

“If it’s big or expensive item, always ask the owner about it. Sometimes they have a story or memory behind it. Once you build that relationship and close the deal, it’s magic.” — Josh

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, also researched that building a story behind an object increases its value by 30 times.

Insight: A garage sale is not a commodity exchange. These objects are meaningful to the seller and buyer.
Design: Encourage the seller to write a story or share a memory about the object. The placeholder text can even provide great examples.

2. Brainstorming

I used Post-It notes to take down ideas of tasks and widgets that would be really add value to the user, and then organized them by step along the user journey. Some ideas that I thought were great but did not implement include issuing flash deals and being able to join group sales, since it was not essential to the prompt. (Flash deals work great on mobile because of real time notification systems, and would be useful to the seller when they are selling on their last day. Instead of being able to join group sales directly, I implemented a group conversations tab in the Conversations page that helps buyers and sellers coordinate easily.)

3. Workflow

4. Paper Prototyping

I decided to design a mobile app due to the ease of managing an inventory of items (e.g. taking pictures, portability) as well as sale discovery (e.g. GPS navigation).

I wanted to draw out a number of different screens and select 8–10 to fully wireframe. For the seller, I prototyped the screens leading from the main dashboard: inventory (leading to add an item), checklist, promotions, and contacts. For the buyer, I wanted to focus on a four-step discovery process from browsing recommended garage sales to viewing an individual item (with an engaging story).

5. Buyer: Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Clickable Prototype:

Monet Buyer: Garage Sale Helper

6. Seller: Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Clickable Prototype:

Monet Seller: Garage Sale Helper

7. Next steps:

User testing is necessary to validate assumptions and test the usability of the product. What percentage of sellers invests their time to tell a story about the product? What percentage of buyers reads the description and how much value does it generate? Additional user research is required, such as some ethnography by going out into people’s backyards to see how people plan, prepare, and promote garage sales. Further iterations of prototypes (or even pivoting the strategy) will be performed.