The capstone project for my User Experience major. The entire unit was dedicated to developing a self-governed group project, and each week was a new checkpoint until final submission. The project scope covers ideation, research, and iterations of prototyping and user testing. It requires us to understand an existing problem space in order to explore a creative solution through user experience design.
Bartr is our approach to tackle the issue of consumerist and unsustainable item use. Our goal is to provide a bartering platform to expand the life cycle of items in a community of trusted users. We can achieve this through the introduction of new systems that influence how users look at item ownership as an initial step of psychological behaviour change.
Research
The average Australian person produces 20kg of e-waste a year, and 24kg of furniture waste per household. Textiles are by far the largest problem, with an increasing trend of people buying more clothing but wearing it for shorter periods of time, due to consumerism and fast fashion. Furthermore, of all donated clothing, only 15% gets resold locally, so as a result a remainder of 23kg per person of textiles are being sent to landfill yearly.
Rich Picture Situations of Use
This model shows the relationship between all potential stakeholders, players and structures we considered in the problem space of item lifecycles.
Red flows = clashing relationships
Yellow flows = conflicted/paradoxical relationships
Green flows = harmonious relationships
Through this chart, we identified the gap in the market for users who share conficting goals. In our user interviews, we discover there are many people who would like to be sustainable shoppers, but fiscal factors outweigh the goal of being sustainable, because often the prices to extend item lifecycles are not worth its value. Hence the target with Bartr is to fill this gap for users.
Our Solution
The amalgamation of our whole semester’s work. This poster was displayed at the year-end MSD DesignX exhibition, along with all others in our cohort. It’s a quick digest of the project scopes, including the stakeholders, storyboard user experience, evaluation and final findings.
Market Day
This is the core loop our application, and our innovation for initiating psychological behaviour change in consumer habits. Below is the demonstration video.
Other Features
Community Bin
This feature can be treated as an item disposal for users. These are items that they don’t plan to trade for another. Other users are free to pick up anything from the Community bin. This feature is perfect as a low-effort option and maintains regular activity on the platform, hence should be the next priority in product development, prototyping and testing.
Invitation-only Platform
From early stage research and interviews, trust is a huge factor for second-hand item exchanges. Especially for a project like Bartr, users must trust that others will maintain items properly before it is passed on to them. Hence for this project, we decided that during beta testing or launch, the platform will curate a community of trusted users, and others can only join on an invite-only basis. All new users are vouched for, while further development of the app can take place to expand the community. Furthermore, to ensure that items posted are not falsified, can only use photos taken with an in-app camera.
