Geofree

Find free items easily

Project goal and overview

"map app of freebies"

Nowadays everything has become easily accessible for most of us. This also means that we frequently change items, clothes, furniture, etc. Sometimes we just decide to live a minimalist life or we have to move out of our homes. These are the times we go over our unused stuff and start looking for ways to give them out because it's not worth the hassle of selling them. Sometimes we give them to our friends and sometimes we live them in the streets for others to pick up. This is very common in Berlin, Germany. However, we want to help people to make this process easier and allow others to search for free items that they may need.

Problem

There’s an abundance of useful objects in the streets of Berlin, but in order to find them you have to be in the right place at the right time:

a) people who need the free items/objects don't know about their existence (unless they come across them by accident in the street)
b) people who want to give away items for free don't know how to share about them
c) this creates trash in the streets because others don't know about these items

Solution

Geofree is an app that allows users to:

a) post their no longer used items for the giveaway;
b) allows others to easily find the free items shared by others.

Tools

  • Miro
  • Figma

Team

  • 2 Web Developers
  • 2 Data Scientists
  • 3 UX Designers

My Role

  • UX Research
  • UX Design
  • UI Design

Timeline

  • Overall: 6 months
  • Discovery & Research: 2 months
  • Design & testing: 4 months

My Design Process

1

Understand

I tried to understand the problem first and looked into the objectives of the project.

2

Research

Conducted user research and learned about user problem;

  • 5 interviews
  • Competitive benchmarking of similar apps

3

Analyze

Analyzed user insights:

  • Created personas
  • Affinity diagram
  • Empathy map

4

Sketch

Sketched a simple representation of the solution:

  • Wireframing

5

Prototype

Inspiration Board
Typography and Logos
Creating UI Mockups

6

Test

Conduct User Test Iterate
Refine

Research

Research

After going over the project background we started with listening to users to understand how they giveaway their free items or pick up free items.

To get deep insight into the problem and how users feel, we conducted several interviews. Each of us reached out to 5 people and conducted an online open-ended interview.



Here is what we learned about givers and takers:

  • They like to clean up their house from time to time, so they giveaway to friends or leave items in the streets for others to pick-up
  • Sometimes it's hard to sync with someone, so they just leave items on the streets
  • They enjoy finding certain items from different times
  • Sometimes items are big so they cannot carry them home
  • Weather conditions can ruin the furniture and other items
  • It's hard to search for exact items, so it's all about luck

Analyze

We brainstormed and analyzed our findings.
Tools used: Figma

Sketching and Wireframing

Sketching

I sketched some of the web pages

sketching
sketching-gif

Wireframing

Tool used: Figma.

Inspiration Board

Before starting the UI Mockups, I love to spend time on different sources searching for inspiration and creating a visual representation of all the images, texts, fonts, and colors. Here I collected some ideas with a focus on our main app color, green.

testimonials

Typography and Logos

testimonials
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