Textbook Exchange Network

Customer Kiosk

Preface

The Textbook Exchange Network (TEN) is a student-run textbook market. TEN helps students to buy and sell their textbooks, in an effort to offset the high costs of college using a web platform.

Prior to this project, TEN did not have a design team. The original web platform was functional, but it was outdated and it was not as user-friendly as it could be. Leading the program's first design team, my highest priority was to improve this platform as I strongly believe in TEN's mission and wanted to reach as many students as possible to help reduce the cost of textbooks.

The platform I aimed to improve is meant to function as a kiosk station. Users input their information to list their books at their desired price or look up books to purchase. After listing the book(s) or adding them to cart, the kiosk will guide them through the payment process

Original Design of the Customer-Facing Kiosk

Research

User Personas

There are multiple users that would use our platform - students who have different needs and administrators (student representatives that partnered with TEN to use the platform) who run the Textbook Exchange at their school. My team and I brainstormed the various users and their pain points, customer experience, actions, goals, and mapped a scenario for each use case.

Example of Our Research Board

User Interviews

After establishing the types of users of the platform, we interviewed students who matched the user profiles we were looking for. We wanted to get a better understanding of how the Textbook Exchange program is run at their school and how our platform can best serve their operation.

We found that our platform needed two types of flow - the option to buy and sell books and the option to borrow and donate books. Some administrators from partner schools preferred to provide books for free and mimic a library than handle transactions.

New Features

In addition to the kiosk, the program leads wanted to implement a donation feature to help with operation costs since we are a non-profit student organization, and a price recommendation feature to assist customers in deciding what price point to sell their book at.

To figure out how to best design the price recommendation feature, I met with the Data Analytics Team to evaluate which figures were most helpful in guiding a user to a price point. We pulled data from past books sold and drafted a help widget that included minimum price sold, maximum price sold, and median price sold for that specific book.

To tackle the donation feature, my team and I researched how other organizations kindly ask customers for donations. We chose aspects of various donation features that deemed fit for an organization like ours and drafted our version of it.

Design

Wireframe

I collaborated with a designer to create a wireframe and get an idea of the user flow since it branches into two separate actions.

Some questions we asked ourselves:

What input fields do we need? Which fields do we make required?
Can the user modify or reverse their actions?
Can the user understand the purpose of every page and button?
Can the user achieve their goal without hesitation?
How can we verify that the buyer's Venmo payment is processed?
How can we persuade the user to donate?

Wireframe of the Buy Flow (Frames 3-6) and Sell Flow (Frames 7-9)

Mockup

After reviewing the wireframe with front-end software engineers, we edited elements that they would have difficulty coding into something more conceivable.

The colored graphics were drawn by my co-designer and the color template was chosen by the program leads.

A prototype of the mockup was made to present to stakeholders for visualization and to the marketing and outreach team to have something tangible when recruiting additional partner schools.

Design Decisions

Progress Bar - The horizontal progress bar on the top of the page is to help users predict the next steps in the process and give an indicator of how many steps are left. The number of steps depends on which action the user chooses (buy or sell).

Price Recommendation - The price recommendation feature is accessed through a hover button with an interactive slider. The slider marks minimum, maximum, and median price from previously sold books while indicating the user's chosen price point in relation to the statistics.

Payment Validation - On the payment page, the developers and I agreed upon having an additional button that administrators can click to confirm that the buyer has successfully sent the Venmo payment to the correct seller. This prevents any user from leaving without completing the process and double-checks if the payment was sent to the correct person.

Payment QR Codes - To ease the payment process, we used QR codes for a direct path to the profile of the Venmo user.

Donation - To encourage customers to donate, we created an animated list of recent donors that scroll through names of donors and comments they submitted. Names of donors are only made public if they chose to fill in the optional input field.

Mockups of the Buy Flow (Frames 3-10) and Sell Flow (Frames 11-14)

Future Direction

Branding - I would like to align with the program leads and marketing team to understand how they'd like to market our platform and what they want to make users feel when they use our product.

Consistency - With branding set in stone, I can make more adjustments to our platform to match the mission and vision of the organization and edit the public website so that the design is consistent all the way through. I also think that the graphics in our mockup can be toned down so that the listing forms don't look too bare or high in contrast to the abstractness of the first two frames.

Design Documentation - After finalizing the design, I intend to create a design document of our revamp so that our designs have a style guide for future designers and software engineers to follow. It will also help with consistency across our website and platforms.

Usability Testing - With the start of school around the corner, the Textbook Exchange will be running the first few weeks of school to help students get their textbooks. I will be monitoring and taking notes on any issues customers or administrators come across to improve the usability of our platform. Ideally, there would have been usability testing sooner in the design process.

Update: Iteration #2!

TEN Design Team: An Ho, Anju Ishizaki, Amber Chong, Alec Portelli

back to projects.