marketplace — Rin Park

MARKETPLACE

Designed an MVP feature on an existing site as a way to systematize a procurement process for Marketplace.city.

Team: Solo designer with support from the creative director & front end & back end engineers

Touchpoints: low & high fidelity wireframes, UI & UX design, brand implementation, client relations, concept & ideation, mobile

High Level Goal

To create an MVP platform specifically for cities and marketplace to communicate and conduct projects stored in one place.

High Level Problem

Marketplace had needed a tool specifically for their process in order to streamline their core business. Using multiple other exisiting applications lead to buried conversations and scattered files, leading to low conversion rates.

Background

Cities are always evolving. As everything in this world does. But there has been a need of a middleman to help guide cities with the right tools to evolve. That's where Marketplace.city comes in. They partner with cities to find these tools and technology to help them develop towards being safer, cleaner, and easier places for their citizens to live in. Read more info on Marketplace here

Clearbox

Organically, Marketplace developed an internal process that constitutes the entire journey of helping governments procure new technology that results with a case study they call a ‘Clearbox’.

What is a Clearbox?

It is a report Marketplace provides the governments they work with, consisting of research specifically curated for their needs.

First Pass

We had a first phase of designing the dashboard that had provided marketplace to communicate with city representatives with the ability to send messages and documents to their clients, have all the sent files be in one place, and invite other collaborators in the process.

The main problem with it was that it was a one way interaction. Cities are not able to respond directly and are forced to return to email Marketplace.

Initial Layout Structure:

Current Designs

Anatomy of latest designs covering two user types:
1.Admin user (Marketplace)
2.City user (city government representatives)

Admin User:

City User:

Messaging Platform

The main difference in this phase was that we included a messaging platform where cities can interact back with Marketplace-thus having one dedicated place to communicate solely for clearboxes, for both ends.

Unread Messages

Each convesation could include multiple contributors, therefore there is a possibility for a substantial amount of messages. Due to the timeline of this project, a quick solution we came up with was for users to manually click on every message to mark as read.

File Sharing

Another critical tool for the both groups of users is the prioritization of key documents and links by having a secure space where Marketplace admins would maintain the most updated versions of documents for their clients—a source of truth, away from the past 5 versions and 7 duplicates.

Collaborators

City users are able to add collaborators into conversations as long as their Marketplace accounts arre associated with the city the Clearbox is assigned to. Since having multiple city representatives assigned to a single Clearbox is not uncommon, we made sure our design and set up allowed for that functionality. However, for safekeeping, we limited the city users’ ability to add collaborators from different cities.

Starting a New Clearbox

Only the admin users are able to start a Clearbox project while city users can only send requests to start one or initiate conversations, where the collaborators functionality is turned off.

Inbox

What we had kept in mind for the inbox was that it was mainly for city users and Marketplace to discuss before any committments to start official clearbox projects. The collaborators section is turned off but sharing documents with each other was a crucial interaction during this stage.