Barter is a marketplace that helps people exchange goods and services without money.

Barter makes cashless online to offline person to person transactions easier and more efficient. Through the application users can barter for goods and services, upload inventory, share services, favorite items & services they are interested in, view other users' inventory & wants and communicate through a process driven messenger that guides transactions.

Millions of people have lost their jobs in the US due to the cascading effects of an already strained market and COVID-19. It was estimated that at the time of this project in the early summer of 2020 that somewhere around 36 million people were unemployed in the US alone. There needs to be an alternative online marketplace that will allow those affected by a loss of capital to continue to effectively and efficiently engage in exchanging goods and services.

Peer to peer online to offline marketplaces exist, but are not oriented toward bartering

Online to offline marketplace bartering have low reported conversion rates for transactions between users.
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Bartering currently relies on an unnecessary burden of text heavy communication between users to complete transactions.

A design sprint oriented toward putting a fully functional prototype in front of users by developing a work around to not having capital to make transactions for goods and services through more traditional marketplaces that also takes the guesswork out of bartering.

Give users the ability to create inventory of goods and services they are willing to barter with that are visible to others through their profile.

Give users the ability to favorite goods and services on the site that they are interested in bartering for, that are visible to others users through their profile.

Create a messenger that alerts users to possible next steps in the transaction & focuses on completion of bartering.

A Design Sprint is by definition limited in its ability to conduct front end research and instead relies more on understanding the problem based on expert knowledge within the team, outlining goals and mapping out the problem visually in this phase. A lot of the deliverables for this section are text heavy, so if you are interested in checking some of those out, click the blue button below!

Problem mapping is a visual exercise that helps users orient themselves to the problem through setting up steps to be completed on the way toward the overall goal of the project. In this case we want users to complete barter transactions in as few steps as possible.

In the second phase of a Design Sprint, I was focused on seeing what sort of marketplaces already existed and how to best adapt what users may already be familiar with for this new product. Again, to supplement the innate lack of user research involved in a sprint the market research done here, coupled with the solution sketches and personas helps provide a stronger basis for the decisions later in the project.

My primary sources for Remix Boards were Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Offerup, Barter Bay & Trade Made, as well as less known others. Peer to peer online to offline marketplace applications (aside from Craigslist) typically feature:

Solution sketches freed me to imagine what pages might look like and how a flow would feel for a potential user.

To foster a greater sense of responsibility and accountability to potential users of this app and to further humanize the situation millions of Americans (including myself at the time) find themselves in, I created these User Personas based on social media stories, a number of service industry group chats, status updates and personal posts shared by strangers, friends and colleagues alike.

This stage was the culmination of the the previous two phases worth of applied research and imagining of new possibilities.

The target audience sheet was a step in my process where I wanted to connect the concept of what I was developing further with reality by diving deeper into who this application would be for and why.

Storyboards are foundational to bridging the gap between solution sketches to wireframe development, it puts the screen in an ordered context of how a user may navigate the application.

The wireframes I developed for this project were centered on creating a comparable experience to what users may already be used to as far as peer to peer online marketplaces and making the experience straightforward and clear to remove ambiguity about next steps during use.

The prototype I built was designed to utilize current and popular peer to peer online to offline marketplace mental models and creating a space that felt familiar, but different.

This is the culmination all of the phases in a sprint where I get to put my hard work in front of potential users.

My usability tests revealed overall favorable impressions of the high fidelity prototype both in concept and in overall experience. Users feedback through out testing the prototype shared how essential they thought an application like this was for people given the current state of local, national and world economy and lack of options for buying and selling goods and services without money.

Through this Design Sprint, I developed a fully functioning high fidelity prototype that may help solve a problem currently experienced by 36 million unemployed people in the U.S. as of May 5th, 2020. Based on my usability results I successfully created a way for users to engage in online to offline transactions without the use of money that felt familiar & intuitive through the use of a design sprint.