Do you ever feel that you don’t want to bargain for your scrap and don’t want to wait for right street scrap dealers to come around. Recyclable waste has a huge business in India. Swapeco provides a platform that connects people who want to sell recyclable waste to the scrap dealers who buy recyclable waste.
Redesigning Swapeco
The original prototype was made by the founder with the help of developer to showcase their idea to an incubation center. After their idea got accepted they soon wanted to redesign the application in a user centered approach.
Process
Research
Our team did semi structured qualitative interviews with 6 people who sell scrap in routine and 5 scrap dealers. We also immersed ourselves in the process of selling your scrap for a day for better understanding of the process of selling scrap.
Extract Insights
After analysing the data from our research we came to know that some of the problems with the current system of selling your scrap are there are no fixed prices for the scrap as street dealers are not fixed and every street dealer provide different rates and there are not many options other than bargaining for decent rates. Though if you go to a big vendor at a shop you might get less fluctuation but that requires more time and transportation expenses. May street dealers use manual weighing machines and people are generally not comfortable with it as they feel that most of the time these machines are compromised. Also many people didn’t feel safe in welcoming street dealers at their homes.
Interviewee x : I prefer selling my scrap to fixed vendor of course as my previous experience with street vendors are really bad. They carry their own small machines(taraju) which are usually compromised as they sometimes put their own weight on the machine, move the needle of the machines or compromise the weights they use.
Interviewee y : I prefer selling my scrap to street dealers as then I don’t have to go to a shop to sell my scrap.
Ideation
To start out the ideation phase, we conducted an affinity diagramming exercise as a team to examine emerging patterns and groupings of activities around selling your scrap.Based on the affinity diagrams and our previous research insights, we realized that having non-fluctuating rates and home picking service will be the main features of the system. We clustered various ideas into themes such as scrap rates, transportation, types of scrap people usually sell etc.
Design
As soon as we had our insights we started prototyping to gain early feedback.
First Iteration
Stakeholder Walk-through
We did a stakeholder walk-through session in early prototyping phase to consider early usability problems. Having stakeholder participate in the process and having whole team listening to how users interact with the interface helped the team gain domain insights.
We used the rough prototype above in the activity. From our initial feedback from the activity we iterated again and this time we also discussed the whole flow of the application again.
The whole activity helped the team sharpen their empathetic response to user’s frustrations and challenges.
Second Iteration
After a group discussion our team made iterated new wireframe and flow of the application.
Wireframe and flow
Paper Prototype
After we settled on our new flow of the application with this new flow in our minds we created paper prototype of the application to get feedback from our real users.
Design Evaluation
We conducted informal usability testing with our paper prototype. Our participants provided feedbacks on accessibility, and discoverability of the UI.
Implementation
From our insights from informal usability testing we started creating user interface of the application
User Interface Design
Build
The application is under developmental changes and will be downloadable with it’s new design at : Swapeco .
Team
Founder : Mukul Chhabra
Developer : Ashutosh Kumar
Designer : Twishi Sagwal
Future Work
We are waiting for the beta launch of new design and get new insights from our users.
