Givit
role
Ideation | Research | Design | Protohack
I was part of a team of engineers and product managers in a hackathon, I was responsible for the user experience and prototyping.
Goal
Givit idea was perceived after being a member of the "Buy Nothing" organization for 2 years. "Buy Nothing Group" allows users on Facebook to donate items to people in their neighborhood. This process saves the members trips to Good Will and it creates a sense of community in the member's neighborhoods. The community is very big on sharing and helping others around them.
Givit's goal is to make the process of giving and receiving easier and to allow everyone willing to give a part of a community.
Givit's goal is to make the process of giving and receiving easier and to allow everyone willing to give a part of a community.
CHALLENGES
We spoke to a couple of admins and this is the most common constraints we heard from them:
- Every group has to be managed by a group of admins who maintain the content.
- Verification of members is done via private message on Facebook. (New members have to share their ID)
- Users with no Facebook account can't access the group.
- Picking who the donated item goes to has to be random, yet there are no tools to support it.
- The user has to private message the address to the person he/she picked. ( At some point Facebook was charging money if you are not friends with a person you want to message.)
- Constant redefining the zones of the group because of growing numbers.
- No analytics to see how many things the users are gifting and receiving.
defining the stories & tasks
We laid out different scenarios and stories we want to aim for:
- A user accesses the neighborhood feed through his app. (Location based)
- A user can upload an item to share with users from the same neighborhood. (2 mile radius)
- Users can ask for items they need or want to borrow.
- Anyone can enter to be considered for an item, a tool helps the donor pick randomly.
- The person who receives the gift can thank the user with a photo or post that will be published in the neighborhood's feed.
DESIGNING GIVIT
We decided to keep the app experience simple with only two pages to navigate: Neighborhood feed and Profile. We also put emphasis on the call to action button which would allow the users to preform the following actions (Give, Ask & Thank).
Neighborhood feed
The neighborhood feed featured information about the neighborhood and members in it. It also featured all the items that are being donated or requested along with the "thank you" posted added by members
- The feed is dependent on the user's location. Users can check the items being donated around their unique neighborhoods.
- The main feed will be a collection of items being donated across a five mile radius.
- "Consider me" button adds the user to the list of people to be considered. The app allows the donor to pick randomly.
- Clicking on the cover photo will lead to the neighborhood thank you feed. This cover also shows stats about the neighborhood.
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Rich ProfileThe profile page will display information about the user and some stats about gifted items, received items, and thanks.
it will also display the items the user is giving to the community. The "Randomly Pick" button allows the user to pick one of the user who have showed interest in the product. |
REFLECTIONS
That was my first full day hackathon and it was great seeing what we can accomplish in one day. We had to be super agile in gathering data from members of the buy nothing group, and collaborating together to come up with an app that solves most of the pain points that exist with the buy nothing group.