Streetbuzz is a system based on matching customer needs with offers from small and local businesses. It allows people to stumble upon offers and also pass on references and prior experiences. It allows these small business owners to focus their attention on the right audience and entice them with personalised messages.
This project applies user-centered design to the development of a web application. Most applications are driven by technologists - sometimes they hit user needs and sometimes not. Therefore, I tried to explore the possibility of designing a web application based on user needs.
There were three major phases:
First was doing user research to understand user-behaviour trends. In this research I focused on how people communicate on an urban scale and came up with three main insights: on-the-go information, real-time micro-news and small business interaction with their customer.
Second, to continue the last insight, I identified that small businesses are not always good at customer management which is important to keep customers and shape the business, this is due to limited resources. Then, I explored the possibilities by user research and prototyping which led to the final design.
Third, through making prototypes, I verified the final ideas.
