So many services and resources can be economical if more people buy into the resource. For example, Ubers are cheaper with more people, as are bulk groceries or family plan subscriptions. However, some university students don’t always know who else they can split things within a timely manner.

Our design concept would connect fellow students with each other so they can split the cost of resources without needing a robust social network.

We focused on understanding the mindset of college students who are looking to split costly resources while living on-campus.

We sent out surveys to understand the behaviors of our target users, as well as interviews to delve into the values and feelings of our target users.

We also completed a competitive analysis of resource-sharing mobile apps that are commonly used, focusing on the following factors:

• UX/UI helpful features and opportunities areas

• Size of items sold (smallest & largest)

• How do they build trust between buyer and seller?

• What info is needed from each party?

Our team organized our research findings into an affinity board, which we boiled down into key learnings:

• Users don’t want to make the first move when initiating and coordinating deals

• Users want as little personal interaction as possible

• Users are only interested in sharing costs when it will save them a lot of money

• Saving money is not worth it if it takes too much time

From our research findings, we created empathy maps for 2 user personas:

• Deal-ignorant, student that doesn’t have network to split costs with others

• Deal-savvy, social student that seeks out cost-splitting opportunities if they have time

Amongst our groupmates, we brainstormed ideas on the best way to support students in sharing resources with other students. We presented our main ideas for classroom feedback 3 times during our project timeline. We developed storyboards of various use cases for our design solution.

From here, we hosted rapid prototyping sessions to flesh out these ideas into interfaces and features, then chose the top ideas. From here, we conducted two rounds of usability tests.

• 1st round of usability tests focused on basic interactions with the mid-fidelity solution

• 2nd round of usability tests involved testing changes made after feedback from the 1st round and used the high-fidelity solution

We learned that students prefer a simplified experience, where cost-splitting opportunities are listed as a dashboard. We also focused more on the overall story that we wanted our solution to convey.

In our design solution, we refer to cost-splitting opportunities as “quests” for students to join, as this centered our experience on completing tasks with other students as a journey.

For the design solution, our team focused on the following criteria:

• Trust - only verified students can utilize the app & transparency about how costs are split

• Low-effort - limited effort required from student for input fields & coordinating logistics

• Accountability - customized cancellation policies design to discourage flaking

• Efficiency - only relevant info is included to ensure frictionless cost-splitting

With these in mind, the feature inventory of the Quest app is as follows:

• Onboarding with university verification

• Home feed with quests from nearby students

• Filter, sort, and search through quests

• Create a quest

• Quest library with saved quests, my quests, and completed quests

• Profile page with student info

• Alerts & notifications

• Payment and setting pay card

• Settings page

Privacy vs. trust: What is the ideal amount of personal information users need to feel trust, while maintaining their privacy?

Accountability vs. freedom: What is the best way to limit last-minute drops from Quests, while ensuring students have the freedom to change based on their busy schedules?