myYard
myYard is a simple way to organize and monitor your yard sales, all while providing your customers a quick way to find you! myYard utilizes the location software of your mobile device to efficiently find yard sales within a reasonable radius for you to check out. Not only are these sales discoverable, but you can also browse the inventory right from your home!
Team
1 designer
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Role
Designer
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Year
2015
Design question
"How might we provide a way to quickly find local garage/yard sales and provide a fluid management system of merchandise & goods?"
Research
myYard is an individual project I embarked on to test my lean UX skills; this project took me a total of 4 days to complete and it allowed me to navigate the user-centered design process within many time & design constraints. I already knew my problem space, so I started by releasing a survey online to gain more insight on how to tackle this problem. I received about 60 responses within the first day and closed the survey to begin a competitive analysis and segmentation. The survey allowed me to understand my two user groups, yard sale organizers and attendees, much more thoroughly with detailed qualitative feedback. My personas were in direct affiliation with the surveyed data and the competitive analysis allowed me to build a core feature list. I took this feature list and did a design mapping to better understand the use of each feature and it’s relevance to my persona’s goals.
Ideate / prototype
I knew with my time constraint that I wanted to focus most of my efforts on the prototyping phase of the design process; I spent roughly 4-5 hours white boarding and sketching in order to formulate a rough outline of the interface. I called on my personas to help influence and justify my design decisions while making sure that my design could be scalable for other uses. I decided to move forward with a geo-mapping home screen that highlighted local yard sales around the user using the location of their device. This was the most user-friendly approach based on my survey data where most users cited that they rarely ever traveled long distances for sales, but rather focused on local opportunities.
The branding of myYard was very important to me, and I spent a good deal of time choosing a color palette and designing logo vectors for my product. I knew that I wanted to go with more earth tones based on the approachability the palette had with yard sale enthusiast. With my survey, I found that signage was one of the main indicators of a nearby sale. This incorporation of a yard sale “arrow” sign was very important because it established a familiarity with my users. This was my first time diving into Google’s Material Design space, so I made sure to use their color style guide and components guide to ensure I was on track with what Google’s design mantra was. I was conscious of Material Design’s constraints when it came to the elements that the style provided while making sure I was setting my design apart from my competitors.
Evaluate / results
As my first real attempt at a lean UX approach, I was excited with what I was able to accomplish on my own within a week’s worth of time. The design was clean, functional, and met my user’s goals during usability testing. I formulated many task, based on my persona’s needs, and performed usability studies on users who I knew were yard sale enthusiast. This lead me to many future design ideas including the implementation of Craigslist ads (most of my users currently use Craigslist to find local sales) and the ability to have items delivered. Yard sales can become a major component of e-commerce with an application like myYard, and give users the power behind their merchandise and management
"No more fumbling with inventory list or forgetting prices of your goods, because everything is right where you need it to be!"
