Duke Textbook Exchange

Inspiration

We were thinking about ways to improve the student experience within the Duke community. Something that impressed us through our years at Duke was the growth and development of Duke Fashion Exchange, which saw the launch of its own website over the summer. The buying/selling experience has drastically improved through streamlined electronic forms for selling products and easy browsing for buying products. We wanted to do the same for the Duke facebook page named "Duke Textbook Exchange" since buying/selling textbook is disorganized and inconvenient.

What it does

The website allows sellers to fill out an electronic form that autofills with textbook information (extracted from ACES) after entering in class info. The seller enters the condition of the book and uploads pictures. The buyers can then browse textbooks being sold in a similar fashion to browsing the ACES directory. The buyers can then submit electronic payment which goes directly to the seller. Both buyer/seller must register with NetID and be Duke students.

How I built it

We first listed and organized the information that was necessary for buyers and sellers. Then we decided the most intuitive way to construct the navigational flow of the website. We got inspiration for designing the structure of the website based off of web tutorials and built it from there after many trials and errors.

Challenges I ran into

All members of the team had no prior experience building a website so we had to start from scratch. Because we are all novices, the learning curve cost us a lot of time so our website is only a front-end prototype.