School Project 1 — SecondBuy — How to Build Trust and Effectiveness between Buyers and Sellers
In my time at Georgia Institute of Technology HCI, I have been participating in several projects where I work as the UX Researcher and Designer.
Three developed projects of mine are in my portfolio, but definitely, there are many more.
And I would like to share them with you periodically.
Project 1 SecondBuy — Build trust and effectiveness between buyers and sellers (this article)
Project 2 Hingama —Boost people’s mood status, help people to be more mentally healthy
Redesign 1 Google Lens — help travelers have a better smooth experience of shopping overseas
Project 1 — Second Buy
SecondBuy is an experience design for students who would like to buy a second-hand bike. It consists of
- A mobile app
- A physical self-service pick-up station
Objective
In Georgia Tech, a bike is one of the most frequent transportations (Side note: when we designed SecondBuy, Bird/Lime is not here yet 😱).
Every year, new students look for used bikes, newly graduates sell them.
So we were thinking, How Might We
- Help buyers to choose a high quality-price-ratio used bike quickly
- Help sellers to avoid spending lots of time to sell it off
Overview
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Buyers can have a quick view of bike’s information in the format of both video and close-ups.
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Buyers only need to input their information of budget and height.
SecondBuy leverage AI to recommend the best bike available to the buyer.
Buyers can quickly buy it, or reload a new one.
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Experts are responsible for providing valuable information to help buyers informed.
Experts themselves are rated by previous buyers in terms of the consistency between experts’ description vs. realistic bike condition.
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In terms of Sellers, they only need to take a quick photo of their bike, and they can drop off their bike at a location, leave all the work to an expert from SecondBuy.
Process Overview
Our team leveraged the classical and detailed design process from IDEO.
Step1 — Empathize
1. Survey
We distributed a 82-response survey to probe into GT students’ likes and dislikes when they buy uses bikes, in this way we can get our feet wet and know what questions to ask in interviews and contextual inquiries.
When buying a used bike, most of people claim they check price and if it works well. Besides, they are concerned about whether bike information seller posted is real.
2. Interview
We conducted 5 semi-structured interviews for in-depth understanding. Since we already knew people’s requirements from surveys, now it’s time to ask open ended questions, gather qualitative data by digging deeper.
Mika is one of our interviewees. She said she doesn’t buy bikes until she tries riding on it and see how it feels. That’s why she would never buy bike online.
But later when talking about her used bike purchase experience, she mentioned: “I went to StarterBike so I can have my bike repair anytime if it’s broken. And it’s really cheap, $50, so no need to try it.” From this we extract the information Trust and Price are more important than Trying.
3. Competitive Analysis
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StarterBike is an organization at Georgia Tech. Students work there as volunteers, they collect abandoned campus bikes, repair them and sell them to students.
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I made a task analysis of buyers buying flow in Starter bike.
This helps us to understand the user journey of buyer trying to buy a used bike currently.
4. Contextual Inquiry
It is not uncommon people might arrive there, just to find out there is no bike available.
StarterBike cannot guarantee there are enough bikes each time people come. They always have a rise in the beginning of a semester, but might get out of inventory easily due to spending time in repairing and collecting abandoned bikes.
Step2 — Define
1. Affinity Diagram
By collecting data from interviews, contextual inquiries and surveys, we did affinity mapping to categorize our findings, so that we can wear users’ shoes, empathize with them to see where their pain points land on.
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Affinity Diagram Summary
Pain points of Buyers
- Lack of bike’s Information
- Lack of trust to sellers & posted info
- Want a lower price
- Have trouble in delivery
Pain points of Sellers
- Time-consuming to negotiate
- Time-consuming to list items
- No access to buyers
2. User Requirements
Instead of trying to solve every problem, we decided to put more efforts in solving the most important and urgent ones.
3. Personas
We distilled data findings and create accordingly three personas considering different age, gender and cultural backgrounds: two buyer personas and one seller persona.
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| Sarah is an international student new in the states.
She wants to buy a used bike without too much effort.
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| Michael is an American undergraduate.
He has a limited budget for his daily transportation.
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| Roger is graduating soon.
He wants to sell off his bike ASAP because of the new offer from California.
Step 3 — Ideate
1. Brainstorm
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Here in the two diamond theory, the brainstorming, the first diverge section, comes to play.
Every teammate is asked to come up with as many as possible ideas to solve above-mentioned problems. In this method of “silence”, everyone’s idea would be heard and not effected by others.
2. Idea convergence
We sorted each idea by their ability in solving problems on a chart with two main questions (Time consuming; Trust) as two coordinates separately.
The higher one idea’s value is in one coordinate, the better it can solve the problem the coordinate stands for.
Therefore, 3 solutions stand out among the 19.
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Experts upload video of the bike
Buyers make an informed decision based on the video
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A Seller post basic bike info and dropped it off in the station
An Expert is notified to check it
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Buyers input budget
Quick access to accept recommendation or pass
Step 4 — Prototype
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We discussed over
Information Architecture
designed
low-fidelity wireframes
test it with users, then move towards
High-fidelity prototypes.
1. Information Architecture
2. Low-Fidelity Wireframes
3. Cognitive Walkthrough
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I quickly made a Lo-Fi interaction prototype and we showed it to experts who have experiences in HCI field for cognitive walkthrough.
They gave us advice about what problems they think users might encounter within UI design, task flow and details of features.
Besides, we both got overall positive feedback but also some concerns about the transaction process because the physical pool, where buyers pick up and sellers drop off their bikes, is not established yet.
Step 5 — Test
1. Usability Testing
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We presented the Hi-Fi prototype to 8 potential users, 3 sellers, 5 buyers to do usability tests. We have three parts in our usability testing: tasks, post-each-task rating, post-all-task SUS and open-ended questions.2
We used Satisfaction, Learnability & Error rate as metircs. Score: 78.4.
I leveraged the testing results to iterate on our prototypes, and thus improved the design.
2. Partial Iterations
Final Deliverables
1. High Fidelity Overview
2. Axure prototype
Reflection
I know what you are thinking.
Well, it sounds like a through UX process with visually appealing design, but I don’t see the market of used bikes.
I totally agree with you. The difference between school projects and real-world products is the “Value Proposition”.
Although the second-hand bikes seem not to be promising enough in this high-tech world, I do see the possibility of applying this process of learning how to build Trust and Effectiveness for both buyers and sellers into other business fields, do you?
