Pixel (Pic-Sell)

Pixel (pic + sell) is an app design and a Capstone project by Lucy Choi. The app is tailored for female-identifying students on campus and facilitates the process of selling and buying secondhand products such as fashion wear, beauty and health products, and furniture. It provides the best alternative for other competitive markets on campus such as swap shops and second chance stores or even off-campus markets such as "buy & sell" Facebook groups, as Pixel operates 24/7 by a trusted, tight-knit social group and community.

Pixel was inspired by the “Female Room of Requirement”, a Facebook group page created in 2019 by a student at NYUAD as an initiative to provide a safe space for female-identifying students to ask and share about all types of female issues. The private group currently consists of 990 female-identifying students on campus at NYUAD and the number continues to grow to this day. Oftentimes people use this group as a platform for selling and buying clothes. However, it's not always a pleasant experience, due to problems like "having to contact the buyers individually", "not being able to keep track of all the buyers", or "not knowing how many people are there in line to buy the product".

After conducting interviews and surveys with users that had neutral to negative experience buying/selling on female RoR, Lucy approached the "How Might We" question: How might we provide a growing community of female-identifying students on campus a time-efficient and systemized platform to help them continue their sustainable purchase?

As a measure of success, she evaluated the satisfaction of the user experience and functionality of the final prototype with anonymous surveys. Lucy user-tested the low fidelity prototype with 5 users. She prepared a series of tasks for the users to complete, discussed ways to improve the interface, then collected anonymous feedback through Google Form. Lucy treated the feedback seriously and made changes after each user test. Some changes implemented include: removing the checkout procedure and adding a reservation list on product view instead, creating proactive help animations, and removing currency converters.

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The research process and the groundwork Lucy conducted show the importance of user experience in digital products and how UI/UX provides the user with a delightful experience and brings value to the business. Overall this project showcases how much a user-centered design can improve the user’s emotional experience, and how rigorous user research can inform good design solutions.