A group project to design and develop an e-commerce web app.
User Researcher / Product Designer / Full Stack Developer / Build Master
User Interviews / Usability Testing / Prototyping / React + Redux / Django
Jan. - Apr. 2020
Competitive drumlines and marching ensembles have a significant amount of used equipment that they need to sell at the end of each season. Many of these transactions take place on Facebook Marketplace or expensive online consignment shops, neither of which fully meet users’ needs. Over four months my team and I worked with this drumline community to design and implement a solution that prioritized them.
Solution
Our team of experts created Encore Performance Gear, an online marketplace for the directors and designers of these ensembles to buy and sell their used equipment. We deployed a minimal viable product to Heroku using React with Redux and a RESTful Django API.
Value Proposition
Encore Performance Gear is a community-run platform built specifically for directors and designers of competitive drumlines and marching ensembles. The site builds trust with user profiles that provides buyers information about the users they’re buying from. Intuitive functionality matches the mental model users have from other e-commerce site, creating a seamless experience throughout the process.
Key Features
- Create accounts for individual users and organizations
- Draft and publish listings for equipment
- Quickly find the equipment you are looking for with intuitive text search, sorting, and filtering
- Message users to negotiate sales and purchases of equipment
- Notify buyers when items are no longer available by marking listings as “sale pending” or “sold”
- Opt in/out of receiving email notifications when you receive messages
Process
Our team of experts used a user-centered agile development process that incorporated UX methodologies into five two-week development sprints.
Sprint 1: Initial user research, configuration and integration of Django API and React
Sprint 2: Wireframes and high fidelity mockups shared with product owner, account creation and basic database read/write operations integrated
Sprint 3: Mockup iterations and refinements, photo upload integrated, significant UI improvements
Sprint 4: Messaging integrated, deployment to Heroku accomplished
Sprint 5: User testing of MVP conducted, user feedback implemented
Current State
This project is ongoing. We are currently using the feedback from our user tests to make large visual and design updates to the app, and details will be added here once it's deployed. You can email me if you'd like to learn more about the current status of the project, I'd love to chat with you about it.