UI/UX Case study: Building a mobile application to create a sharing economy

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Mediio

7 min readOct 20, 2022

When designing a mobile application, we often do not get enough time or resources to follow every step of the UX design process we studied. In this article, I will go through the process I followed to design a share-economy mobile application. For this project, the User Experience was designed utilizing five core stages: Empathize, Ideate, Design, Prototype, and Testing.

Our modern world is driven by consumption. Technology has made it easier and faster for users to buy things online, which often leads to buying things we don’t need or buying items we only use once or twice and never use again. Fast fashion has also made us buy new clothes more often than we need. What happens when you want to declutter your house? More often than not, we would throw away all items that we find useless. Some may be in bad condition, but we also end up throwing away things that are still in good condition; because we don’t have a use for them.

Project Background

Three years ago, when I was at University, I was studying a course on Information Systems. For our final project, we were to choose an area of interest and implement an Information System to solve a problem. My team chose to create an app that would allow University students to rent/share items. As students who lived in the dormitory, we found a need for an application that would help us share things we own. After my final presentation and completing the project, I made no progress or further development on this topic.

A couple of months ago at work, my CEO asked my opinion on the sharing economy. He mentioned how his children have outgrown their clothes, but they are still in good condition, and he felt bad throwing them out. After a long brainstorming session, we came up with the initial idea to develop a mobile app to create a platform for renting, sharing, and donating.

There are many applications in the market available where users can rent, share, and donate what they own. With most of these apps, users make transactions with strangers, making them more vulnerable to scammers.

“According to a poll by GoodRich, an insurance management agency that recently released a report on investment and spending habits of young Koreans, 83 percent of 1,000 people in their 20s and 30s surveyed said they have bought or sold second-hand items in the past year. Some 27 percent said they have done it more than six times.”

Understanding the Problem Space

To empathize with the users better my first step was to understand the problem space better. In my secondary research, I searched the web to identify common problems users currently face in the existing share markets. The most common problem(s) faced by users were:

Users were asked to share their documents (identification) to verify their identity. Many users found this act to be an invasion of their privacy.
With many people currently using secondhand marketplaces, the number of scammers and spammers on these platforms has increased.
Users often need to travel far to receive items they wish to rent/buy. They also need to travel to meet a total stranger to complete the transaction. Some users felt uneasy about traveling to meet with a stranger, or sharing their location with strangers.

Understanding User Groups

Through my initial user research, I was able to identify the following user groups:

Group 1: University students who are on a budget. These Users:

Students sometimes need specific books, tools, and technical devices to complete their assignments. They find it a waste of money to buy these tools since they only need them once.
Would use second-hand market apps to find what they need.
Can use some extra cash renting out items they own but rarely use.

2. Group 2: Parents of young kids. These Users:

Tend to have children who grow up and out of clothes fast.
Vary in age, occupation, and family size.
Find it hard to donate their children’s used clothing to strangers.
Don’t want to throw out pretty, expensive clothes for their young children.

User Research Summary

I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the users and their needs. A primary user group identified through research was University students and Parents of young children.

These users showed a need to borrow items they have a one-time use for and donate old items which are still in good condition.

Other user problems these users faced when using other second-hand mobile applications included: too many scammers, dealing with unknown people, and other security-related concerns.

Competitive Audit

Currently, there are many second-hand marketplaces out there. From these, I have chosen three competitors to audit. Since I am in South Korea, my target market for this application is South Korea.

Carrot Market (당근 마겟) is a secondhand market that allows its users to buy and sell items with people living in their neighborhood. This app is currently the largest secondhand marketplace in Korea, having over 21 million active users. Currently, one of the main problems this application is facing; is the increasing number of people getting scammed because they are dealing with strangers. Apart from this, this app only allows its users to buy and sell items. There is no option for renting.
Myomee is a B2C mobile app solution that allows its users to rent premium consumer goods. Users can choose from a wide range of products such as fashion, beauty, home appliances, baby products, etc. One main problem with this solution is that the rental period is pre-determined by the application. The items rented out on this app are also quite expensive.

User Personas

Information Architecture

After ideating and brainstorming, we developed an idea to design a mobile application where users can create communities with people they know and trust to share, rent, and donate items.

To move on to the UI design phase, I created a flow to determine the correct screens and flow. Following is the finalized IA.

Wireframes

As the initial design phase continued, I created wireframes of the base screens utilizing my findings and research. I made multiple screen layouts for each screen and chose the best layout that works best for each screen.

Style Guide

After wireframing and it was time to bring my interface to life with a high-fidelity UI design.

Color:

One of the main problems I faced was choosing a color for the interface. I wanted to use a fun color that is easy on the eyes and gives the users a feeling of trust when using the app. Initially, I narrowed it down to a light shade of blue for the app.

After conducting further research, it was evident that many Korean app users prefer to have applications that they can customize. KakaoTalk, Korea's most used chatting application, allows users to download and change the app theme as they please. Following this concept, we decided to introduce an option inside the app where the users can change the primary color of the app. The initial app color will be blue. Through settings, the users can change it to pink, orange, green, purple, or yellow.

Font:

The application was to support two languages: English and Korean. One of my favorite fonts for UI design is Open Sans because it is a font that looks good with both English and Korean texts. Open Sans is also a highly legible font that is easy on the eyes. I find this font to be ideal for regular everyday consumption. Users can read blocks of text written in Open Sans.

Branding:

My team and I had a brainstorming session to choose the name we wanted to use for our app. After hours of discussions, we finalized the name Billinda. Billinda (빌린다) means to borrow in Korean.

We also wanted to design a simple, easy-to-remember logo. Initially, we chose the logo to represent the feeling of community and sharing. There were multiple sketches of the initial logo design draft. Later we decided to follow a much simpler design for the logo. We designed the letter ‘B’ to look like a smiley face.