Overview

Treasure is a mobile app that highlights user’s favorite local and undiscovered small businesses that are also known as gems. It allows users to promote their own favorite small businesses to their friends to cultivate a community that supports small businesses, whether it’s local or international.

For the event, we had a week to prototype where it would then be scored by professional designers and product managers. At the finale, we presented our final prototype live in front of a different panel of judges from Instagram and Adobe.

ROLE:

Visual/Brand Design, UI/UX Design

TEAM:

Ke Lin

TOOLS USED:

Adobe XD, Zoom

DURATION:

1 week (July 2021)

AWARDS:

5th place out of 290 teams globally

I. IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM

Problem

Your challenge is to design an accessible third-party app for mobile devices that highlight people’s favorite local and undiscovered small businesses.

II. IDEATION

Process

To begin our design process, we went through the design thinking process to first redesign the problem and create an innovative solution.

User Flow

After our brainstorm session, we listed different possible features and then mapped out a user flow for the multiple interactions within the app. We would then reference this user flow when skeching our low-fidelity wireframes and prototyping.

Final User Flow for Mobile

My Low-Fidelity Sketches

Ke’s Low-Fidelity Sketches

After making our low-fidelity wireframes, we went straight into making our high-fidelity prototypes due to time constraints. This was my third time using Adobe XD, so I was still getting the hang of some of the functions. We took advantage of the animation and timing function to create seamless transitions, microinteractions, and animations throughout the prototype.

IV. FINAL DESIGN

Sign Up & Onboarding

Explore & Search

Our app curates users’ personal interests to make it easier to discover businesses. Through the explore page, users can click into businesses’ pages to view items and add them into their hidden gems folder to save for later. On the search page, users are also able to view trending businesses near them.

Chat

Treasure provides a closer connection between local businesses and customers as they are able to personally chat with owners, and users can ask questions and further express their emotions on the products or services.

Profile

Our app allows business owners to update in one coherent timeline in their profile page so that users can easily find the latest news on their store. For users who are customers, they can feature their favorite small businesses on their profile pages for their friends to see.

V. REFLECTION

What I Have Learned

This was one of the first times where I had to build an app from the ground up. Creating a brand along with the name, logo, and design system guidelines was challenging. Through this experience, I learned the importance of creating a strong theme and brand beforehand in order to make the designs cohesive, especially while collaborating with another teammate remotely since there are many times where we work independently.

Challenges

The topic was broad and relatively new to my team, making it challenging to figure out the essential needs of the users. We also had to keep in mind other existing apps, but by thinking long and hard about the problem, we were able to create an app that we believe encapsulates users’ needs, whether those users are customers or small businesses.

Next Steps

If I had more time, I would conduct some user research and user tests to see if the features were effective in achieving our goal. I would want to conduct a series of user tests among small business owners and customers to compare both sides of our app and ensure the features are intuitive and easy to use.

fiona truong

Treasure