Designing ShareMate: A Journey into Building a Community Sharing Platform
Explore the design journey of ShareMate, a platform connecting college students and community members for easy item sharing. From user needs to intuitive interfaces, discover the challenges and insights in creating a solution fostering sharing and community building. Whether you're a designer, entrepreneur, or curious about design, this story offers a glimpse into product design and development.
Note: This project was part of my application for the UX designer role.
🤔 Problem statement:
👉🏻 Sharing of books, musical instruments and other items within communities and campuses has been a challenge with more people having similar interests but no access to certain items.How can you create an effective solution to solve this problem within campuses and large communities?
🧘🏻 My Role
- Understanding the behaviours, needs, motivations & challenges of these users.
- Making use of various UX research & Design iteration methods to articulate your solution.
My Process: Explore 🧐 → Ideate 🤯 → Design 🤠
Explore: I utilised this time to understand the user based on my assumptions and inspirations from available resources. As a first step, I began brainstorming about the research goals, such as who would actually want or use a product like this? What are their pain points, needs, wants, and goals?
Typically, users start this process manually by calling their friends or contacting mutual connections to get things done. The same applies to communities, but some (gated community) might use an app to organize a few things. However, as the member count increases, it becomes challenging.
Therefore, for these users, it would be easier if a tool could help them search and perform all actions in one place rather than having to shuttle between different applications.
Primary Research
User Interview:
In order to move further, I conducted user interviews with a certain set of questions to validate the issues to be solved. I spoke to two people who is a college student and gated community member. This interaction took place over a telephonic discussion.
Questions asked in user interview:
- Can you share your experiences with borrowing or lending items within your community or campus?
- What are the main challenges you face when trying to share or borrow items?
- How do you currently find out about items available for sharing within your community or campus?
- What motivates you to share items that you own but do not use frequently?
- What tools or methods do you currently use to organize sharing within your community or campus?
- How do you think a centralized sharing platform could benefit you and your community or campus?
- What features or functionalities would you like to see in a sharing platform designed for college students and community members?
- How important is sustainability and reducing waste to you when considering sharing items?
- Are you open to sharing items with people you do not know personally?
- Would you be willing to pay a small fee for a sharing platform that offers additional features or benefits?
Sorting gathered information
From my online research and a few telephonic conversations, I was able to list the pain points , trends & expectations of potential customers. I was able to create a few hypotheses. The hypotheses could lead to either features or principles to follow during the design stage. For a deeper look at the card sorting, Sorting room
- I was able to identify 6 values that seem to be at the core of our potential customers’ expectations: Convenience , Trust , Education , Accuracy , Price-value , and Relatability
- These values will help group future insights from learning about our users
- Further, each hypothesis satiates one or more of these values, which will help tip the scales during prioritisation based on the ruling order of values for the target demographic
Findings and Takeaway💡
Importance of Sustainability
- Finding: Both college students and gated community members value sustainability and believe that sharing items can help reduce waste and promote a more sustainable lifestyle.
- Takeaway: Highlighting the environmental benefits of sharing on the platform and integrating sustainable practices could resonate with users and attract more participants to the sharing platform.
Co-ordination and community challenges
- Finding: Both college students and gated community members face challenges in coordinating with others to borrow or lend items, such as finding someone with the item needed and coordinating a time to borrow it.
- Takeaway: A centralized sharing platform with a messaging feature could significantly improve coordination and communication among users, making it easier to share items and overcome these challenges.
Synthesis
User persona (To whom are we designing for?):
It would be unrealistic to try to solve for every single use case and user type in the timeframe permitted, so I focused this project on a single persona (below) who seemed most representative of the feedback I received from the user interaction
Ideate
Based on the above research and insights, I have developed an initial understanding of our sharing platform for college students in shared apartments. However, the true challenge is to streamline the platform’s functionality to seamlessly manage the sharing process for both individual apartments and larger campus communities
🤔 Assumptions
To define the scope of our sharing platform, I’ve made the following assumptions:
- Revenue Generation: Initially, revenue generation is not the primary goal for the first 9–12 months. Instead, the focus is on building a strong and engaged user base.
- User Base: The goal is to build a retainable customer base by providing a valuable and user-friendly sharing experience.
- Target Audience: Our target audience consists of tech-savvy individuals aged 18–50 who are likely to embrace and benefit from a digital sharing platform.
With the handful of informations I structured a Information architecture focused on organising, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks.
ShareMate (The name for this app)
- “ShareMate” embodies the platform’s core mission as a trusted companion in the sharing economy.
- The name combines “Share” and “Mate,” emphasising our focus on facilitating item sharing and conveying companionship and reliability.
- It captures the friendly and collaborative nature of our platform, making it a fitting and memorable choice for our app.
Then I created User flows focused on a specific user task, Here’s the scenario for the flow ⬇️
Sarah, a college student 👩🎓, wants to rent a GoPro📸 for an upcoming hiking trip🗻. She uses the ShareMate app ✨ to find a GoPro available and arranges to borrow it from a fellow student, John🧑🏻🎓.
Design
With the knowledge from my research using my trusty whiteboard, the next process was making sense of the flow on a user-to-screen level. Within the given time frame I have created 3 major screens
Ending notes 🎬
“I’m pleased with the outcome, especially given the time constraints. Developing a research-driven digital solution within the specified timeframe was challenging, but I believe I successfully showcased a futuristic sharing platform with ShareMate. While I focused on the task flow, there are several areas I could further explore and enhance.
That’s a wrap thank you for reading.
Hope you found it useful and interesting!🙂 Feel free to Feel free to comment if you’re interested in learning more about the metrics and tracking methods we use to assess whether ShareMate is achieving its business objectives. Reach out to me on Twitter | LinkedIn | Portfolio
