XD Daily Creative Challenge: Marketplace
Share Used Items and Real Memories with ThreadSpin
How can people resell or donate their used items with sustainability in mind?
ThreadSpin is an app that helps people share used items and tell the stories of those items.
ThreadSpin makes the process of buying and selling used items fun and heartwarming. In helping people share their experiences with their items, ThreadSpin makes sustainable consumption a joyful and deeply human experience.
Interactive Prototype
The Customer
Who is ThreadSpin designed for?
Customer needs and pain points
Wants to have more sustainable consumption practices than buying new all the time.
Feels sentimental toward items—attaches memories to things, and therefore not fully ready to give them away or let them go.
Wants to know that their items are in better hands from someone who needs them.
Things to consider
How can storytelling encourage people to buy others' used items?
How can storytelling encourage people to sell their used items?
How can customers feel gratified from interacting with each other on a digital marketplace?
Initial sketches
These initial sketches help me create a vision of what direction I want to take with the product, including its layout, interaction design, and visual design.
Some design choices at this stage
Item info: I draw out all of the user-supplied information inputs that would make sense in a marketplace app, such as a comment on the item's condition (named "quality" here.)
Tell a story: The progress dots suggest that the user would tell several stories about their item—here, at least three.
Low-fidelity wireframes
Lo-fi wireframes help convey the vision of the app in terms of a design system without having to push pixels or overthink design choices.
Some design choices at this stage
General: I provided sample content instead of placeholder content to better envision how well the design can communicate the content.
Item info – Add Photo: I split up the "item info" screen into several steps to make it easier for the user to complete each section.
Tell a Story: The user can now submit just one story, instead of three. I realized users may have reasons for not being able to tell three "required" stories; for instance, if they barely used their item.
High-fidelity wireframes
These hi-fi wireframes refine the interaction structure laid out in earlier wireframe iterations, and illustrate my final vision of the product's design, taking into account color, typography, and a precise layout.
Some design choices at this stage
General: A major visual design choice was to turn the line under the main headings (purely visual) into a progress bar (a helpful navigation component). Two birds with one stone!
General: Not pictured in these wireframes is the extensive amount of work put into creating the prototypes. The Auto-Animate feature in XD is very helpful in creating smooth and creative transitions between screens, but it also demanded a lot of discipline on my end to make sure every animated element and component was properly labeled.
Things to consider for future projects
Emotion-centered design: This project made me consider users with a specific emotion: sentimentality. I wonder to what extent it is a useful or sustainable practice to design for people of certain emotions or personality types in this way.
Other features: It would be interesting to consider how other features in the app integrate storytelling to help users separate stories from their physical belongings. For instance, an item listing could show all of the different stories that past users have attached to that item.
Don't reinvent the visual wheel: While I would like to improve my visual/UI design skills, I felt like I spent too much time playing around with colors and making pixel-perfect adjustments. In the future, I will consider using UI kits or even creating my own design system to help expedite the visual design process.
