The building blocks of my greatest solo project ever
Student
Pieces is a B2B platform designed to support and facilitate sales by users of secondhand retailers such as depop, grailed, ebay, facebook marketplace, and mercari.
The platform would allow users to manage their listings across multiple platforms, view all their messages, and keep a database of inventory for easy management.
I designed this mobile app as part of a school project in 2022. The idea came from my love for secondhand clothes and later would serve as the foundation for an actual product I built named Flipkit.
How can we remedy the gripes of the reselling community and create an intuitive database/inventory management platform that provides relevant insights into performance and trends through a more engaging interface.
The Goal
To gain a deeper understanding of the user base and competitor market, I conducted a thorough analysis. Being a former user of many of these platforms and a dedicated reseller myself I had an idea of where to look an a network of suitable subjects to research/survey.
My goal here was to try and understand my users better as well as the platforms that they are already familiar with, that way the transition to a new app would be frictionless. Here are some of the trends that I saw:
Research
I pulled a lot of my inspiration for my wireframes from existing platforms, are.na, and behance. I tried my best to keep things light while maintaining a structure and flow that I could easily modify as I discovered holes in my design framework.
Wireframing
After multiple iterations and critique, the final designs for mobile and web were established. These designs featured sleek and easily distinguishable elements for interactive sections as well as informational components to help users better onboard and understand the platform I created
Hi-Fidelity Designs
The project provided valuable insight into information architecture, user research, design systems, metadata, and data aggregation. I enjoyed learning how to properly utilize margins and auto layout for mobile design in a way that is fruitful and proper.
Given more time I would continue conducting more user testing and fleshing out some more of the onboarding components of the prototype.
Going forward I look forward to the next steps of this project: further iteration and html. integration.
This project would serve as the starting point for my most comprehensive project to date, Flipkit, a further fleshed out and fully working version of this idea that I helped grow from start to finish. More about this project can be found here.
Final thoughts and Takeaways
