Treasure hunt in local neighborhood

length: 5 month

Problem

Household items in fair condition are thrown away; unused items are piling up in garages. Although the options to trade and exchange used household items are currently available, the activity of trading used items could be better facilitated to engage more people.

Design

We designed eXchangeFun to facilitate a community treasure hunting experience, allowing people to discover used household items available in their nearby communities.

Tag-Post

From our conversations with our users, we found that people may have more than a few items for sale. It is time consuming to post the items one-by-one. eXchangeFun allows people to post multiple items easily by tagging multiple items on a single picture. The innovative Tag-Post design also provides flexibilities for users to present their items.

Wish List

"I feel like I am helping my neighbor when I am able to provide her with an item on her wishlist." While browing for items to buy, buyers can see the seller's wishlist. This encourage the users to exchange items with one another and helps remind users of their forgotten items to offer to their neighbors.

Building upon the trust and feeling of closeness that people have for their community, the design creates more opportunities for reuse.

What was my role?

I was a facilitator for this project. Most parts of the project are collaboration works. We worked together in a design studio, bringing our  different perspectives of the design problem to keep ideas flow. I was particularly involved in the Exemplar Research, Storyboard, Concept Sketching, Screen Mock-up and treasure hunting experience design. Besides, with the help of Yujia, I planned the design dession and analyzed the insights from the session. Yujia and I learnt the Expression Blend in this project to develop a high-fidelity mockup to demonstrate the interactions.