The Trunk: Making NU More Sustainable
• Software Developer
• Product Researcher
• 1 CS student (me)
• 1 design student
• 3 marketing students
The Problem: Moving Furniture at Northwestern
Trunk is a project I worked on during my time in Northwestern's Bay Area Immersion Program.
I worked as the only developer in a team of design and journalism students. We had to pick an issue
that we were passionate about - we decided to go with interior design, and how it pertains to Northwestern's
campus.
We had all experienced moving into a new apartment or house, and noticed that during moving times there were
many
couches, desks, and other furniture items that were left on the street. We thought that this process of
students moving
was not very sustainable, and wanted to approach this problem.
Existing Solution: Free and For Sale
Currently, the way that Northwestern students buy and sell items is through Facebook's Free and For Sale
group. This group
is meant to be for Northwestern students, but many alumni who don't live in the area are still part of the
group. We identified some problems
with the group:
Limited search functionality - searching "chair" is not effective
Multiple items are listed but only one price at the top
Alert for the user's unsold items is not very visible
Way too many members, not all live in the Evanston area
After identifying these problems on Free and For Sale, we started thinking about how we could solve these
problems
and make the moving process easier for Northwestern students.
Low-Fi Prototypes: A "Better" Free & For Sale
Our initial prototypes and low-fidelity wireframes were focused on improving the userflow of Facebook's Free & For Sale.
With "Dumpst Dive," users could filter and search through items on the app (functionality that is not available in F&FS).
With "Last Call," the user could view locations of donation centers for them to drop off unsold items.
We then combined these two similar ideas into one web application prototype.
User Feedback
We had several approaches for user feedback.
Survey for NU students
Interview other students
Conduct user testing with NU students
After conducting surveys, interviews, and user testing, we found some key takeaways:
Students want to buy used furniture
Physically moving items is the biggest barrier
People are always looking for items
Connecting buyer and seller is slow and tedious
We found that the main problem students were having was not the process of buying and selling on Free & For Sale -
the problem people were having was that once they found an item they wanted, it was hard to organize the logistics of picking it
up and communicating with the buyer/seller about the item.
We decided to pivot, and rather than redesigning the userflow of F&FS, we decided to abstract the process away from the user to
make these actions as easy and painless as possible.
Reevaluating: Journey Mapping
With a new direction in mind, we decided to make journey maps of potential users.
The first journey map we did was for a buyer, before using Trunk. The buyer has to
look through F&FS, decide what items they want, and message the seller. There's no guarantee that
the item is still available, or that the seller will even message the user back.
We also did a journey map for a seller before using Trunk. There's no guarantee that anybody
will message them, and they might even get lowballed.
This is the journey map for potential users of Trunk. The process of negotiating and interacting with
another student is simplified, and abstracted away.
Wireframes in Figma
In Figma, we fleshed out the interface and user flow of the app.
Some key improvements of this app compared to F&FS are:
Easier to find what you want
Only NU undergraduate students
Seller doesn't have to move anything
React Native: Final Product
After the wireframes were finalized, I developed a barebones application in React Native using Expo Client.
A lot of the app is hardcoded, but this product is meant to be a demo for users to "get the idea."
To avoid using a router, the navigation is done with a Controller.js component that keeps a global
state of what page the user is on, and returns corresponding components accordingly.
Check out our GitHub
Repository to view our final prototype!
