Barter Bee

1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Link

2. Describe your project (max 150 words) Barter Bee revolutionizes university life, empowering undergrad students to seamlessly exchange necessities, foster community connections, and alleviate financial constraints. This innovative app facilitates the bartering of meals, ingredients, clothes, furniture, media, tutoring, mentoring, and various services within the campus network. Recognizing the challenges students face in accessing essentials due to the high costs of college and limited transportation options, Barter Bee becomes a vital resource. By providing a platform where students can effortlessly trade goods and services without spending a penny or leaving campus, the app not only eases the burden of expenses but also fosters a vibrant culture of peer interaction.

3. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) Google Forms After a team brainstorming session, we made a survey to collect insight from college students on their main challenges and priorities as our first research process. As we created the survey, we made sure to include open-ended and simple questions to ensure users could complete the survey comfortably. Once it was created, we sent the survey out to various platforms where undergraduate students were available. Over the span of a few hours, we gathered over 50 responses. When it came down to what undergraduate students struggled the most with, it was getting easy and quick access to food. Over 77% of the respondents stated that food is one of the most important items to a college student. However, around ⅓ of the respondents also stated that money and/or transportation issues played a factor in their inability to get food. There’s a pattern between college students and money, in the sense that students often can’t get easy access to bare necessities because they lack all the means. We began to think, what if there was a marketplace just for students at colleges, who could easily communicate with one another about their urgent wants and needs? In our survey, one of the questions was about whether our respondents use services such as Facebook Marketplace, Depop, etc. Surprisingly, 50% answered “not likely” to this question, meaning the other 50% do, in fact, use these services. With such a neutral outcome like this, we decided to ponder about how we could develop a service even better than these, so that the majority of college students would be willing to utilize it. As a result of this survey, there were numerous challenges for us to ideate about, including how to provide affordable meals/products and how to get students willing to use a marketplace. Thus, Barter Bee came to life. Our second research process included navigating through all the similar services, such as Facebook Marketplace, Offer Up, Etsy, and Depop. By doing so, we studied their user interfaces, including both their positive and negative aspects. This gave us inspiration for our own user interfaces, as well as problems we could solve, to result in a seamless overall user experience.

4. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words) In our design process, the most pivotal decision we made was to prioritize simplicity and focus exclusively on bartering, along with facilitating the exchange of services, products, and meals and ingredients within the college student demographic. This decision was calculated by research and user testing aimed at understanding the unique challenges and priorities of our target audience. College students, burdened with academic workloads and limited time for part-time jobs, expressed their struggle to meet essential needs due to financial difficulties. To address these challenges, we decided to streamline the app’s functionality, refraining from the complexity of social interactions online. This decision ensures that our platform provides a straightforward and practical solution that aligns with the hectic schedule of college students, making interactions limited while being meaningful and catering to their specific needs. Our app, Barter Bee, emerged as a revolutionary solution, empowering college students to seamlessly exchange necessities and alleviating financial constraints. We launched our research with a survey, crafted after a team brainstorming session, collecting insights from over 50 college students mainly located in Texas. The survey highlighted the uppermost importance of easy and quick access to food among undergraduates, with financial and transportation obstacles hindering their ability to meet this fundamental need. Recognizing the financial struggles students face, we decided to exclude monetary transactions from our platform. Furthermore, a comparison with existing services like Facebook Marketplace, Offer Up, Etsy, and Depop informed our second research process. Analyzing their user interfaces, we identified both positive and negative aspects, inspiring our own design choices and uncovering problems to solve for a seamless user experience. Through these research findings and user testing insights, the decision to exclude monetary transactions serves as the foundation of Barter Bee’s design, ensuring it addresses the specific needs of college students in an efficient, user-friendly, and financially accessible manner.

Built With

• chatgpt
• figma
• google-survey