essentials

Rethinking the way Americans purchase Essential items in the midst of the global pandemic

overview

Have you ever reached for the toilet paper, only to find there was none left? All of America experienced this feeling in early 2020.  

When asked to design an app that solved for 2020’s greatest challenge my team knew exactly what we needed to do. The four of us, partnered with 3 frontend developers to deliver the best mobile app experience we could to our judges in only 36 hours.

 

type

Student Group Hackathon

scope:

36 hours

team

Siena Tetali

Amelia Muenzburg

Luis Zazueta

Alex Rowley

 

my roles

UX Research, Visual Design

tools used

Figma

hypothesis

One of the most unforeseen challenges of 2020 was toilet paper outages all over the country. Not only toilet paper, but other essential items like hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes and even milk and eggs! We believed that creating an app specific to these essential items would:

  • Prevent shoppers from showing up to empty shelves by being able to reserve items or shop online

  • Reduce the risk of infection by allowing users to spend less time searching for items in high risk areas, therefore increasing exposure to Covid unnecessarily 

  • Decrease wait times, which increases long lines, therefore increasing chances of infection

the process

Due to the nature of this project, there were certain processes we had to omit to meet our 36-hour deadline. Because we were working with front-end developers, we also had to allow time for them to complete their own part of the process. This meant the UX process was extremely condensed. 

While my teammates were in charge of creating a user flow, product inventory, identifying essential items to be used in the app, managing comms with the devs, etc., I was in charge of research and visual design. For research, I focused on a competitive/comparative analysis, where I worked to find other companies with similar functionality. Due to time constraints, I did a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, & threats) analysis of competitive (Instacart, Postmates) and comparative (Google, Yelp) companies. This helped me identify needs and wants of users since there wasn’t time to do actual user interviews.

bringing it all together 

After incorporating research into the rest of my team's plans, we were able to jump into visual design. This is what we handed off to the developers!

1.png
2.png

my design methodology

  • Clear CTA’s to guide users through their tasks

  • Clean design, no cognitive overload to distract from the Essentials

  • Display of important information such as wait time, store hours, and distance

final takeaways

It’s true that working designs can be made quickly but to make it work, you may have to sacrifice visuals, functionality or complexity. For-fun projects like these are good practice to stretch your brain and test your capabilities with new constraints!