Water Street Market
Water Street Market is committed to fostering a sense of community. A quaint European inspired shopping village described by locals as their community gathering place. Every shop is independently owned and operated.
Challenge
Water Street Market has many shops, restaurants, and services, but has a weak online presence. Some of these places may be overlooked by visitors due to a lack of knowledge that they are within the market. Our goal is to increase visitation by making users aware of their existence and what they have to offer through the use of social media.
Our app aims to increase Water Street Market’s online presence, thus increasing its public exposure. It will also allow store owners to assume a more interactive role with their customers online through the use of reviews and the option to post exclusive deals and updates in real time. The app will also assist customers with navigating the physical layout of the market by including an interactive map.
User Research
Personas
Each team member created a persona for our target audience groups to understand how they might be motivated to use the Water Street Market app based on their current frustrations and future goals.
User Flowchart
Together we designed a user flowchart to optimize the user experience of the app, specifically what functions, actions, and decisions would be necessary to make the app useful and worth downloading. This helped with our understanding of how users would naturally want to navigate through the Water Street Market App.
For a more in depth view, check out our case study!
Affinity Diagram
Card Sort
Information Architecture
Design Process
My Initial Design
Each group member was tasked with producing a possible design for the app before coming together for collaboration.
First Group Design
This is our group's first collaborative design.
Second Group Design
This is a look at our second design that was completed by myself, Kim Blum, and Claire Riis a year later. We decided to change some of the fonts as well as our color choices to make the app look cleaner and modern.
Design System
Deliverables
View working prototype here
Main Takeaways and Future Goals
The main goal for the Water Street Market app is to increase foot traffic within the market. The app allows shop owners and patrons to communicate in another way other than in person.
Our next direction we'd go in to enhance our app even more, would be to add a more comprehensive interactive map. Ideally, users would be able to "walk" through the market in the prototype.
My Contributions
As Project Manager. I was mainly in charge of overseeing the creation of our user experience. In order to do this, I put a lot of my focus on organizing our research and case study file. I enjoy conducting user tests, creating personas, affinity charts, card sorts, and data visualizations to make sense of the research.
I also contributed to the design by helping with typeface and color choices, sizing of attributes, designing the opening screen's collage, and creating components for our screens on Figma. My personal goal for the future is to create a comprehensive component library for the app.
