Kollect, a marketplace that gives your furnitures a second lease of life — IronHack final UX/UI project

The team

One month ago, Elisa Rault, Business Analyst at Engie, and I, Service Designer at the EC Paris, embarked on the crucial end-of-bootcamp project journey of the IronHack UX/UI bootcamp.

These intense four weeks of work led to te creation of Kollect, an efficient and responsible marketplace that provide furnitures with alternative futures.

The intuition at the origin of the project

I recently moved house and Elisa is planning to do so in a couple months. When talking about how we did / will get rid of our furnitures, we both regretted the inexistence of an app’ to sell and buy second-hand furnitures that would propose a seamless journey such as Vinted for clothes.

To understand if this was a personal wish or a shared assessment of the situation, we conducted interviews with other potential users that had moved in the last two years.

Framing and deep diving into the issue

Here’s what we learned from our research: between the age of 18 and 30, young adults often move from house to house before settling down for educational or work purposes. Yet, they often dread the moving process for multiple reasons.

Why is that? Well, they do not invest in pricey furnitures but rather purchase occasional objects to furnish their studio or two-room apartment. And when comes the time to move, they encounter several issues to get rid of these “cheap yet in good state” furnitures.

Our persona

1. Julien does not manage to sell furnitures online: on marketplaces such as LeBonCoin, hispost is lost amongst a sea of ads for clothes, cars and houses. He then receives thousands of messages from unvetted users who bargain intensely (although the starting price is low) without ever being guaranteed to actually sell the furniture. #inefficiency
2. Julien hardly manages to give his furnitures to charity organizations: Some charities do not accept small volumes of furnitures. Other charities are saturated. And when they accept a donation, transporting furnitures throughout the city is a pain in the neck. #noalternatives
3. Julien ends up putting his furnitures on the street or asking the city hall to pick up them up: consciously knowing they will pollute and end up in the communal dump although they could have started a new life, at another house, or being donated to people in need. #waste

Understanding the market

We thus concluded that there was a real need for a solution. But which?

Finding a solution

We brainstormed and came up with KOLLECT, an online marketplace of second-hand furnitures that would provide users with a seamless experience.

The concept is easy to grasp:

• First, you put up your furniture on the app’ with a due date.
• You haven’t sold it but still need to move house at this date? Let us collect your furniture.
• Once collected, you have two choices: leave it online and get a percentage on the sale if we manage to close a deal OR donate it to a charity organization.

Prototyping the solution

We started by creating the architecture of our app’:

After a couple of hand sketches, we came up with some wireframes on Figma. Here’s an example:

We rapidly tested these wireframes with potential end-users and iterated on the layout several times before moving on to graphic elements.

Coming up with a brand identity

First screens where our brand identity & UI kit is applied

• Kollect’s brand values are transparency, simplicity, proximity.
• In terms of colors, we opted for a warm yellow as primary color which stands for trust and optimism. It is frequently used in the transport sector (e.g: DHL) and on the furniture and hardware markets (e.g: IKEA). We then completed it with a palette of shades of grey and black for the text.
• In terms of typography, we selected a geometric font, Nunito, for its versatility. Used as light, its clean-cut aspect is highly legible which is key in terms of accessibility a mobile app’. Used in bold, its serifs bring a convivial aspect to the text which is in line with our friendly identity. In black, it can be used to create impactful advertising campaigns.
• In addition, we chose wired yet round icons to follow the same double idea of cleanliness / friendliness.

Animating our prototype

Try it out on this link! 📲

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave your remarks and comments below. 😊