Easy Buy

  • This is a design for collaborative shopping which does not simply serve as a common repository of advertisements but also encourages in person meetings. The main characteristics of this design are the convenience, simplicity and efficiency. Please view the wireframes below for details.

  • This coffee table facilitates sharing and discussing various advertisements. It has a interactive surface on which the webpages may be duplicated, split and passed around. The physical location of this table makes it a convenient platform for sharing.

  • The idea of this design is to have an agent who understands the desires of all roommates and suggests products accordingly.

  • We used KLM to compare the times taken for the most common task in collborative shopping, using Gmail, Google Notebook and Wetpaint and Easy Buy. The final results where: Gmail(35.976s); Google Notebook(18.974s); Wetpaint(32.169); Easybuy(14.728s);

  • We conducted think aloud sessions to evaluate our wireframes. This helped us identify the good and bad aspects of our design.

Project description

Roommates often have to collaboratively shop for furniture. They are faced with challenges such as slow response time, repetition of work and differences of opinions. Easy Buy is a system which facilitates collaborative shopping between people.

Process

We saw a video of a contextal inquiry conducted with roommates and modelled it. We noticed that there was a lot of duplication of work, there was no common platform on which they could have all their information at once, people changed their opinions after talking personally to each other, but they seldom found time to meet each other. We created an affinity diagram and set our focus as facilitating collaborative shopping without eliminating human-human interaction. As the home was a common place where all the roommates went, we tried to make our design integrate with the physical model of the apartment. We used methods like key stroke level modelling and think aloud studies to confirm the usability of our design.

Design

Our solution was two phased.The website EasyBuy enabled shoppers to browse mutliple advertisements and mark their favorites. The web application minimized duplication of work, optimized search, enabled users to comment and found common available times and encouraged users to meet. The other phase was an interactive table top, where the webpages may be pulled up, duplicated, divided, passed around between users and edited.