Case study — Trödel Spende: Second-hand Marketplace
How design a marketplace, creating a sense of trust using gamification?
Hey there! Welcome back to my UX/UI Design Journey! This time, I’ll talk about the final project in my Bootcamp at Ironhack, what were the challenges, processes, and team decisions, but I advance you, that enjoying the last weeks of this project, was the most important!
Stakeholder: Trödel Spende | Stéphane Piette & Daniel Reinhardt
Team Project: berna akpinar, Gloria Rossi, Carolina Torres Arzamendi
Timeline: 2 weeks | Device: Desktop
Design Challenge: HMW can use gamification to encourage the upload of items and donations, HMW reward the best donors on the platform & HMW collect and display each user’s trustworthiness/reliability.
About Trödel Spende
Trödel Spende is a second-hand marketplace with a good cause: sellers donate items, giving them a second life and choosing an NGO they want to support, while buyers acquire them by donating the desirable money amount in exchange. This idea is positive from everywhere you see it!
We had a meeting with Stéphane Piette and Daniel Reinhardt, the founders of this project. They were accessible from the very beginning and we got close communication during the whole project, making us always feel part of Trödel Spende’s team!
Project Management & Design Thinking Process
We created our work plan, and establish as a group our individual and team goals, rules, and values in a Team Canvas. At the same time, we set times to make use of tools accordingly to the Design Thinking Process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test), and for rest. We even had some team building!
Empathize
Stakeholder Interview
As I mentioned, we’ve got a stakeholders’ meeting that included an interview to understand the company’s history, at which stage it is, the challenges to deal with, and the goals they are pursuing, and one of them was to motivate users to upload more donated items to the platform.
On the other hand, we could ask about its brand attributes:
User Survey
Get down to work! We started creating a survey, obtaining 68 responses, which let us know which second-hand marketplaces preferred our users, what they like or dislike about them, and other valued insights:
User Interviews
After we obtained all the quantitative info, we went for our qualitative info by interviewing 3 users:
2 Trödel Spende Users
1 User who buys and sells second-hand in marketplaces
Thanks to these interviews, we rectified assumptions and we could hear their desires and thoughts:
We decided to improve the design of the website version since it’s already been created before to jump to the Mobile App version.
Simultaneously, the challenge was redefined, people were not interested in gamification in a competitive way but focused on recognition, we assumed this will avoid scams and bring the sense that the person with a badge is real. Plus, we considered some desirable features to add.
Competitor Analysis
We did a competitor’s analysis with the most mentioned second-hand marketplaces by our users as indirect competitors, because they don’t have completed the same concept (they don’t donate the money to an NGO), and we added Humana, even if was not mentioned is a direct competitor, they sell donated clothes online and the raised money is donated to their organization:
And the Visual Competitor’s Analysis with it:
Define
User Persona
Time to create our User Persona! This Persona represents the pains and goals of the researched group, we named him Gabi. Let’s meet him!
Problem Statement & Hypothesis Statement
We defined the users’ problem, and proposed a hypothetical solution, describing how we’ll prove it with quantitative results:
Ideation
Jobs-To-Be Done & Worst Ideas
For this part, we made some exercises: Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), if you haven’t heard about it, let me explain to you: it consists of developing a product for a user’s specific goal, moreover, we wrote some Worst Ideas, this is about bringing the worst solutions boosting creativity as an inverted process, it was a fun activity!
Moscow Diagram
Bring 3 designers together on a project… What’s the result? A bunch of ideas! Naturally, the next thing we did was to prioritize them over a Moscow Diagram:
This tool led us to determine which features to focus on, first Must-Have and then Should-Have ones, which we were able to deliver some.
Moodboard
To understand more about the brand, we created our Moodboard which represents Trödel Spende for us displaying the concepts of community, goodness, helping, charity, positiveness, items such as the sustainability part, a heart, and held hands inspiring us by its logo.
Before creating our Style Guide, I was in charge of testing our palette to see which colors work well together, verifying it always with my team:
We crafted the Style Guide to create consistency, standardizing UI elements:
Let me know what you think about the badges, since I was in charge of the illustration designs!
User Flow
We delineated Gabi’s User Flow, we made it easy for you to know what Gabi is doing and which page is seeing, guiding you by the shapes and icons:
Prototype & Test
Lo-Fi Prototype & Test
We drew some wireframes based on the prioritized pages and features. I studied and analyzed different platforms, and I concluded and proposed:
Landing Page: Users seek reliability and trustworthiness not only from users and NGOs but also from Trödel Spende, furthermore, it’ll save time in the future to explain what is the product about. That’s why I proposed to implement it thatƒ includes: what’s about, NGOs and testimonials.
Home: For this, I drew 2 types of navigation search: on top categories and left divided by Near you, Favorites, and NGOs
Profile: I propose to add an item feature inside the profile and, as you can see from the reviews at the profile’s bottom valid recognition and trustworthy
NGO: As we discussed before, we agreed we have to bring more info from NGOs, so it was planned to add videos but I thought maybe NGOs don’t count with this type of media, but pictures, give them both possibilities.
I share with you my drawings:
We put all the sketches together and combine the propositions we liked from each other to create a LoFi Prototype which was tested.
Mid-Fi Prototype & Test
We redefined it accordingly for tests and this is how the MidFi wireframes looked like:
Hi-Fi Prototype & Test
Finally, we gave some colors and typos to it!
And Voilá, here it’s the prototype, and yes, you can test it yourself!
You can follow Gabi’s user flow in this video:
We’re still doing some Hi-Fi tests to get more feedback, and taking notes. As you can see in the last test I conducted:
I have to admit that I’m learning in each test not only how to conduct them, but to be a good tester too!
During this time, Daniel and Stéphane included the Design Team in the whole process. They even invited us to a UX Lab event organized by the Berlin Start-Up School Accelerator, where we could conduct some tests and be testers as well for other apps/websites. It was an enriching experience!
The design is getting implemented little by little! You can take a look at the website, and you’ll find the proposed footer, also, take your time to donate or buy some items, just click here!
Conclusions & Next Steps!
As I mentioned before, we are still doing some tests, so it is only improvements from now on
Redefine some UI elements, create more User Personas and User Flows
Continue communicating with the developers/IT department
There were only good vibes for this project, I confirm the moodboard is pretty well reflected
We’ll collaborate for the next project: the Mobile version, so stay tuned!
Thank you again for reading me!
I remind you, if you want to collaborate, be in touch, or want to see more projects from me, please do it through my Portfolio website, Medium, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
