Errandly is a mobile marketplace application for college students to post and fulfill daily errands with their peers.

As students enter college and adulthood, many are on their own for the first time in their life and face a sudden increase in individual responsibilities. Standard tasks such as moving apartments, picking up food and supplies, or caring for a pet can be difficult without a car or a consistent local presence.

We explored this problem space by conducting guerrilla interviews with 6 students across Pittsburgh campuses. To understand their pain points, we also surveyed 35 undergraduate and graduate college students nationwide about college-specific chores where they needed an extra helping hand.

User Interviews

Our 6 interviews highlighted 3 groups that faced the greatest coordination challenges: freshmen, international students, and students without cars. Specifically, those building a new support system from scratch may struggle more to find resources and help.

"As an international student in a new country who doesn't know anyone well yet, it can be hard to find someone who can help [with errands]."

– Graduate Student, University of Pennsylvania

"I have difficulty with tasks that require a car, and I didn't bring a car to college. Carrying a lot of groceries, moving apartments, or storing my items over the summer are all tasks where I have to ask around and hope friends can help me."

– Undergraduate Student, Carnegie Mellon University

Real World Examples

We explored our own college group channels, chat groups, and social media circles. I found various real world examples of students requesting help with errands, chores, and services across different platforms, validating that this behavior already existed.

I conducted the competitive analysis across service marketplaces and college community platforms to identify gaps in campus-specific coordination. We observed many existing services that focused on completing chores or fostering college communities, but not both.

What this meant was that none were designed for campus-specific needs such as summer storage or finding quarters for dorm laundry machines.

For example, in researching student use of Facebook and Discord, we noticed that while platforms hosted many school-specific groups, conversation would often be unfocused and inconsistent. Facebook skewed toward older students and alumni, while Discord was more popular among underclassmen.

Students relied on these communities like Facebook Groups, Discord, and group chats to ask for help, but requests scattered across disconnected platforms were easy to miss and couldn't reach a large group of potential responders.

To explore the product's information architecture, we each sketched several early concepts for the marketplace experience. My direction, NexTask, established the three primary navigation areas that carried through to the final product: Marketplace, Post, and Profile.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

We translated the core flows into low-fidelity wireframes using the Balsamiq Kit on Figma, and asked 5 users to test 3 core scenarios: posting an errand to the marketplace, picking up a peer's errand, and viewing an errand's details.

Usability Testing Round 1

Feedback from this first round of testing helped us uncover 2 main areas that required rethinking, directly informing our high-fidelity prototypes.

High-Fidelity Wireframes

Using the revised set of hi-fi wireframes, we built our first interactive prototype.

Usability Testing Round 2

We tested our interactive prototype with 4 potential users, using 12 different feedback points to adjust the first development version. Testing highlighted many opportunities to improve visual scanning, so I refined Errandly's visual identity. I focused on helping students quickly find relevant errands while keeping the marketplace visually lightweight.

Design System

With the user experience validated through iterative testing, we shifted our focus toward implementation. I collaborated on the SwiftUI front end while helping integrate Firebase services and native iOS APIs to transform the prototype into a functional marketplace application.

We made sure that our data and information architecture were logically sound to streamline our development of Errandly.

Building the Foundation

To support a two-sided marketplace, we structured the application around two primary collections: users and errands. This data model became the foundation for authentication, marketplace listings, user profiles, and real-time updates throughout the app.

App Version 1: Create the essential experience

Our first development milestone focused on shipping the essential marketplace experience. I contributed to building core, must-haves flows: Google authentication, user profiles, errand posting and browsing, and full CRUD functionality so students could create, edit, complete, and remove errands.

Usability Testing Round 3

Between versions, we conducted testing with 6 users. Testing on physical devices uncovered 2 opportunities that I helped address on the second version:

1. We needed to prioritize refactoring our code for less lag. There were performance issues when deployed on real devices. To enhance the user experience, we refactored code to ensure smooth interactions and faster response times within the app.
2. We had to create immediate feedback for different user types as we lacked any feedback posting an errand or marking an errand as completed. I introduced clearer redirects, loading states, and permission handling so users always understood what happened after posting or completing an errand, such as sending a user back to the marketplace with an updated feed after posting an errand.

App Version 2: Leverage native iOS

In the second version, we integrated key APIs: CoreLocation to fetch users' real-time location, iMessage for student communications, and Apple Pay for seamless errand payments.

Although our semester concluded after the second development milestone, we identified several opportunities to further mature the product. For example, one highly requested feature we didn't have time to implement was enabling user communication to stay direct in the app, instead of redirecting to iMessage.

Motivated by these discussions, I continued improving Errandly independently. I conducted another round of design critiques with 5 designers.

Guided by their feedback, I redesigned core user flows and explored how the student experience could become more holistic, cohesive, and community-driven with a focus on usability.

These explorations culminated in two redesigned core experiences that bring together the usability, accessibility, and community improvements into a more cohesive product vision.

Example: Julia wants to get groceries, but has no car in her college city. She faces a variety of complications: the city bus system is unpredictable, Uber is expensive, and there are too many bags to carry.