TIMELINE

Feb 2024 – Jan 2025

MY ROLE

UX Designer

COMPANY/ORG

Sliks

College students don’t have an organized platform to buy/sell services on campus.

THE PROBLEM

As a college student, I’ve noticed many of my peers have side hustles on campus, such as cutting hair, doing nails, or offering tutoring services. However, they often rely on social media as a marketplace which becomes hard to manage for the buyer and hard to find for the seller.

Current methods for advertising and finding student-provided services on campus lead to:

  • Disorganized Platform: Shared Snapchat stories are cluttered, making it difficult to find specific services and limiting visibility.

  • Limited Discoverability: Instagram pages require active searching and may not reach the target audience effectively.

  • Lack of Trust: These platforms don’t verify if the sellers and buyers are students on campus and don’t provide ratings/reviews

  • No Integrated Transaction System: Payments and scheduling are handled separately, adding friction to the process.

How might we create a user-friendly platform that organizes and showcases services sold by students for students while facilitating safe, easy transactions for college campuses?

THE SOLUTION

Got a skill… Sell a slik!

Onboard

  • Onboarding to allow users to personalize feed based on their interests

  • Student accounts are verified using school email

  • Quick and easy setup!

Peronalized Feed

  • Homepage organizes the sliks being sold in categories for the user to find

  • Includes some popular and recommended sliks for the user to discover new services

  • Integrated search bar to find specific sliks

Viewable Sliks

  • Sellers have profiles with reviews and ratings

  • Description section allows the sellers to provide additional information to the buyer

  • Gallery sections allow the buyer to see what the seller showcases

Communication

  • Messaging page is helpful for asking questions for buyers/sellers and figuring out logistics

  • Communication on the app is both convenient and safe since all users are verified, students

Easy Transaction

Sliks partners with Stripe for secure payments and financial services for the users convenience

Define>Research>Design>Evaluate>Reflect

OUR APPROACH

DEFINE

What to solve?

During this phase, we engaged in extensive brainstorming sessions to identify a significant problem on college campuses. Our discussions led us to recognize the need for a centralized platform for service exchange, which became the foundation for the Sliks app.

Our Research Methods…

RESEARCH

  • Services students want or provide

  • Platforms currently used for service exchange

  • User experiences with existing methods

Surveys to find:

  • Student service providers (e.g., barbers)

  • Students who frequently use campus services

  • Professors with design background

Interviews with:

Helped Us Find:

  • Students frequently use and provide various services on campus such as tutoring, hair-cutting, dog walking, and doing nails

  • Current reliance on social media platforms for service exchange is inconvenient

  • Existing methods lack organization and are limit outreach

DESIGN

Prototyping

  • Niche Definition: Based on our research, we refined the app's focus and target audience.

    • “Sliks”, a playful way to spell skills backward, is a platform for students on campus to buy/sell their skills.

  • Initial Wireframing: created preliminary wireframes incorporating our research findings

  • Mood Board Creation: Our team collaborated on mood boards to establish color schemes, logo designs, and overall style

  • Prototype Development: Using insights from previous steps, developed a comprehensive Figma prototype

EVALUATE

How did we do?

  • User Testing: conducted observational studies to analyze user behavior and experiences using our prototype

  • User Interviews: gathered detailed individual feedback based on their interactions with our prototype

  • Focus Groups: presented our solution to a group of students interested in the app and got feedback from them

  • Prototype Refinement: Based on user feedback, made necessary updates to the prototype:

    • Increased color contrast

    • Navigation bar icons/placement

    • Onboarding sequence

  • Ongoing Feedback: continue to collect user feedback for future updates and improvements

This was my first app design project, here are my takeaways:

REFLECT

  • Designing is a long iterative process with many steps:

    When I first started this project, I had little experience but was eager to learn. After forming connections with my team, thanks to their help, I was able to learn Figma and other design software to contribute my ideas. This project taught me the value of having many perspectives to find a solution to a problem in design. It took countless brainstorming sessions, interviews/surveys, and user testing to find a working solution and even now, there are many more steps ahead.

What did I learn?

How can I do better?

  • Prioritize research when designing for a user:

    Especially with this project, due to the dynamic nature of a college campus ecosystem, it was important to do extensive research and learn about existing methods for service exchange to truly understand how to improve it. That research is what prompted our entire solution, so using more research methods such as usability testing, field studies, and focus groups will provide increased insights to help build the app further and find the necessary updates to make.

What’s next?

We released an initial version on the app store but there’s more…

Currently working on updating the app according to user feedback, including additional features such as improved user navigation, campus lost and found, and buying/selling of used products or even school game/event tickets. Check it out >

THANKS FOR READING 🧠

Here’s some more work👇🏽