Team stayed driven to create CampusX marketplace app
By Crysta Jones, Rohit Rammohan and Andy Johnston
This journey has been arduous with many detours. Features were added and then cut. We spent days agonizing over colors and fonts and logos. Which platform would be best? That took a few discussions. There was even a name change.
But CampusX is here as a native mobile, peer-to-peer marketplace exclusive to college communities.
It’s similar to our original Dog Deals idea, but is no longer limited to UGA students, faculty and staff. Hence the name change (which sparked much discussion). And yet, CampusX (X stands for Exchange) remains true to the original idea.
We’ve also kept the basic tenets of safety, savings and sustainability in mind.
It’s exclusive to people with a .edu email addresses, which provides a layer of security to the transactions. In addition, our user profiles decrease the anonymity and enhance the accountability missing from other marketplace websites and apps.
The grind was worth it. We have an app.
Product Pitch
CampusX is a mobile-based marketplace that offers affordability and accountability for your college community. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni with a valid .edu email account can sign up to buy, sell, and trade items ranging from clothing and home decor to electronics and used textbooks.
This iOS application is a secure and safe mediator for peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. With easy-to-view user profiles, CampusX helps combat the anonymity of other online marketplaces, which provides peace of mind for both buyers and sellers. CampusX is not only safe, but also convenient, quick, and affordable to buy from a fellow student or professor at their college or university.
Buyers will start on our easy-to-navigate product page, find what they want to buy, and then securely message the seller. Sellers will find it simple to list their products, add photos, and land a buyer. Both buyers and sellers can then agree to meet at one of our recommended Safe Zones, well-lit and well-traveled areas on or near campus.
CampusX is great on users’ wallets and their peace of mind, thanks to its affordability, access, and accountability.
Solving the Problem
Students (specifically female) who buy and sell used goods online from websites and apps such as Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and OfferUp told us in interviews that they didn’t feel safe when meeting people to finalize transactions.
Other online marketplaces such as eBay and Mercari are based on shipping items, so in-person exchanges are more rare. Anonymity is a particular problem with Craigslist, which doesn’t require profiles and provides only limited information about users.
Based on our research for our Competitive Advantage Report (CAR) and early interviews, we found our main competitors would be Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist based on the fact that transactions and exchanges were done between buyer and seller, and little to no shipping was involved.
Our choice to design and build an online marketplace was confirmed by information we learned while researching our CAR. We found that 75% of people “are comfortable buying an item directly from a person online,” according to Poshmark. And we also found that clothing (27%), books, movies, music and games (16%), shoes (13%), and bags and accessories (11%) make up the top four categories bought second-hand, either online or in-person, according to a 2020 Statista Global Consumer Survey.
We kept safety at the forefront of CampusX.
In addition to making CampusX exclusive to students, faculty and staff with .edu email addresses and featuring detailed user profiles, we added “Safe Zones,” a list of suggested exchange spots that helps eliminate the fear of meeting unknown people in unfamiliar areas. Students who are unfamiliar with a city outside of their campuses now have a resource for identifying busy or high traffic areas.
In doing so, we discovered that the University of Georgia Police Department has designated a “clearly marked, well-lit” portion of its parking lot with video surveillance as an “E-Commerce Safety Zone.”
Naming Issues
We knew deciding on the right name would be critical, we just didn’t know we’d spend a few days discussing and debating the merits of what seemed like hundreds of combinations of words and phrases.
What’s worse? We did it twice. Once for Dog Deals and then after we rebranded to CampusX.
Here are a few examples of the discarded names:
- Bulldog Market (sounds like a place to get a sandwich in Tate)
- Bulldog Bargains
- Bulldog Exchange
- Bulldog Swap (nice flow, but the app’s premise is geared toward buying and selling, not swapping)
- Dawg Deals or Dog Deals
- DawgEx
- UGA Exchange
- Market 1785 (Year UGA was founded. Yeah, we know.)
- Arch Market
- Market 403 (Just pure desperation: 403 is the room number where our class met.)
Finally, one day, Andy wrote CampusX on the top of the sheet of paper where he had drawn a crude sitemap. Andy liked it. Crysta and Rohit accepted it. It stuck.
Design Features
Our initial wish list was long based on our research of other online marketplaces and marketplace apps.
We wanted to include many of the services that they feature, including camera accessibility, product categories and GPS location services. We slammed the brakes on several items after a couple of discussions with Capstone Project professor Chris Gerlach. His experience with these kinds of projects helped us temper our expectations and we learned not to grow attached to a particular feature or idea.
And then we realized our technological limitations with SwiftUI and Xcode. Andy compares it with trying to learn a new language and then speaking it within a couple of weeks of seeing it for the first time.
Oh, and then there are the deadlines. Four months. That’s all the time you get.
So we whittled our list to these features:
- Exclusive those with.edu email addresses
- Product search
- Detailed profile page
- Profile search
- In-app or email messaging
- List of suggested meeting places
Going Slowly With Swift
None of us had seen SwiftUI prior to the start of fall semester, when we took NMIX 6310. We certainly didn’t know it was the programming language that Apple used to code iOS apps. And our unfamiliarity with it made us hesitant to make CampusX a mobile native app.
Not that we’re fluent in JavaScript and HTML, mind you, but all three of us are more comfortable coding with those tools (thanks to NMIX 6110 and NMIX 7110) than with SwiftUI. After discussing it with Gerlach, and since our EMS is geared toward a target audience of college students, it made more sense to make an app since they do practically everything on their phones.
Rohit showed a proclivity to SwiftUI, an ability to understand how the language works, and an attention to detail for wrongly written code and missing punctuation, so he took on the bulk of the coding responsibilities. Crysta was a major asset with coding, and Andy helped where possible, as we dove into Google, and relied on our EM professors (Gerlach, Emuel Aldridge, Leah Moss, and John Weatherford) and classmates for help and hints when necessary. Specifically, Aldridge was a huge help with coding and the intricacies of SwiftUI, JSON, and PHP.
Here’s a breakdown of the inner workings of CampusX:
- The framework is a mix of SwiftUI, HTML, PHP and MySQL.
- Programming in SwiftUI, using XCode as the default IDE, is used since it’s the native programming language developed and supported for iOS. It was primarily used to design the layout of the app the way it’s seen on a mobile device. We used CSS to design the web-based pages.
- HTML and PHP were used to create forms to submit data to a MySQL database for data such as user accounts and posted products. PHP was also used to retrieve data from the database and display it in an HTML web page within the app using WebKit, which is a framework to display HTML pages within iOS apps.
- All user-submitted data is converted to a JSON, which is displayed within the app using a Codable protocol. That decodes the data and stores it from each column within its own variable in SwiftUI, which is called to display the relevant data within a List View.
- We designed our black-and-white wireframe and full-scale prototype of CampusX with AdobeXD. We also used Adobe XD to iterate several splash screen options and decide on a final color scheme. We used Adobe Illustrator to create our logo.
“My most valuable resource was Mastering SwiftUI for both versions (Xcode 11 and Xcode 12),” Crysta said. “The team also used Hacking With Swift. I built the Sign-In page based on an article from Hacking With Swift. Apple’s Developer Guideline for Xcode is also useful.”
“The most valuable resources that I have come across over the course of this program would be my amazing professors and the outstanding cohort that I have had the chance to get to know and work with,” Rohit said. “Apart from that, as far as online resources go, I would personally recommend Hacking with Swift and W3School, which are sites dedicated to teaching coding at the layman level and proved to be the most useful to me and to my team as we worked through the capstone project.”
Lessons Learned
Bright lights and big dreams ruled the initial days. Building an app wouldn’t a problem, right? Yeah, right.
We quickly learned that this would be tougher than we imagined. And we knew we needed to play to our strengths, divide and conquer the tasks and trust each other.
Crysta handled much of the design, including the style guide and the website. Andy took care of the bulk of the writing and Rohit carried the coding burden. We quickly learned we could count on teamwork to get the work done. And done well.
Deciding on branding and a color scheme wasn’t as easy as we initially thought. We spent hours scouring logos, putting colors together to see if they complimented each other, and debating the overall look and design. We finally decided on a family of blue that’s easy to look at and versatile enough to use with white and black type.
We set deadlines for ourselves, which worked with our personalities and helped keep us accountable. There was plenty of stress throughout the process, but sticking to the deadlines was key to being able to have time to troubleshoot and tweak.
Trials of User Testing
User testing during spring semester showed us that even though we had a product, there were plenty of issues that needed to be tweaked, added, or deleted. We found 10 user testing participants that met our target audience — mostly undergraduate students and largely female—that we identified through research, reading, and projects in Moss’ JRMC 8016 class and Gerlach’s NMIX 7005 class. But we also included male students, graduate students, professors, university staff, and a recent alum, who all have .edu email addresses. Of our testing group, 40% were undergrads and 70% were female.
We shouldn’t have had the hierarchy issues that we learned about in 8016, but we did. User testing quickly showed that. We also learned we needed to fix our wording in places, design consistent buttons and links, and work on the spacing between our instructions and the fields they describe. We took the advice of our testing participants to refine the navigation and add a way to email the sellers.
“Need more instructions for signing in; needs more buttons on the items; needs more navigation guidance,” a test participant wrote in the post-test survey.
We also pleased to learn that our color palette was pleasing to the eyes, our vibrant, “clearly labeled” category page was easy to navigate, and our “Safe Zones” page not only surprised our users, but was a huge hit.
“Visually appealing — especially the menu page; love the concept; like the emphasis on safety,” a test participant wrote.
Overall, we were pleased that 60% of our participants were able to post an item for sale in less than 2 minutes on the CampusX app and that 92% of them said they would use our app.
We took it from there. We continued to improve and incorporate the suggestions, according to what we learned in our testing. We also took advantage of the time between testing and presentations to refine other areas, such as the look of the product search pages, and tinker with the coding.
The Result
We love and are proud of our app. There were plenty of doubts, fears, and shaky moments along the way, but we stayed together, played to our strengths, and delivered an iOS marketplace app that could function in a real world environment with a more adept technical hand. We showed that three incredibly different individuals could come together, learn what we needed to learn, work with demanding schedules, tolerate our unique personalities, and form a working bond that made something from nothing, and then made it better.
Overview
“I initially joined Grady as a Journalism concentration student. After my first semester, I switched to Emerging Media. I am so happy that I pursued EM. I discovered that I enjoyed web design, web development, branding, and product design. I originally wanted to work in a newsroom as a reporter. Now, I would like to pursue a career in graphic design, product design, or UX design and research.” — Crysta Jones
“I was, even prior to first learning about EM and the NMI, passionate about digital media going back as far as I can remember. My first decision to consider a career, or at least study the field, was after an internship in California for a media firm that taught me there was a lot left to learn and ways to learn. After that, while I completed my undergraduate degree in Information Systems and began pursuing a career in Supply Chain, I always kept my eyes and ears open for a way to delve into and learn more about digital and new media. A year ago, when I learned of the existence of the EM Program and the NMI, I started to consider the idea of returning to school, and looked into more programs similar to EM, but none seemed to fit the bill quite like this program did. It was like it was tailor made to my interests. After that, the decision was made and I left my job and returned to school. I don’t think there’s a moment since then that I’ve looked back at one of the best decisions I have made.
“Through the course, I’ve learned so many new skills, some of which I would have never thought (based on ridiculously painful experiences) I would have the capacity to learn, like SwiftUI or JavaScript, or other skills which I never even thought about learning, such as design through the Adobe Suite. Looking forward, I can see that the EM program is going to play a very big part in what I hope is going to be a very bright future. With skills such as the ones I’ve learned in the EM program, I’ve recently received, accepted, and started a new job as an associate for a digital media firm working with the analytics and media teams assisting them with various ongoing tasks related to advertising and analytics for their clients.” — Rohit Rammohan
“The EM program not only helped re-introduce me to a new generation of college students, professors, and emerging technology, but also prepared me to teach on the university level by arming me with a master’s degree. I learned technical skills that I never thought I would, or could, through the classes and projects, which not only increase my skillset, but provide me with the knowledge to succeed in future endeavors.” —Andy Johnston
Advice
“We had so many fantastic ideas for CampusX. However, our ideas didn’t often match up with our skillset. Don’t be afraid to dial down your ideas. ‘Make it work, then make it work better.’ ” — Crysta Jones
“Always remember, you’re not alone in this. If you ever find yourself stuck at any point when building your capstone, lacking for ideas or not sure of your next move in building your idea, you have classmates, alumni and professors who have done this before and who always have your back.“ — Rohit Rammohan
“If you’re on a team, work as a team. Designate responsibilities and trust one another to accomplish them. Have honest discussions if someone’s work isn’t up to the level the team expects and work with them to improve.” — Andy Johnston
