Our Story
About the Market Project
We started this project with the belief that the experience of the online marketplace could be enhanced by encouraging more instances of storytelling. What informed this belief was months of research, speaking to users, development and testing to find possible ways to encourage more storytelling in online craft marketplaces.
One of our earliest inspirations was looking at the trade culture on the Silk Road - how people traded and how stories were such an important aspect of the transactions that took place there.
Our hopes
We hope to encourage greater exploration within the field of UI/UX design for e-commerce platforms which can help reshape the practice of consumption in the marketplace and prompts both its sellers and buyers to engage in the story, moving away from passive consumption and celebrating creativity while fostering a greater sense of belonging in the environment.
And this website is the outcome of all the work we put in, to share our findings and our solutions with you — UX designers, marketplace creators, content strategists or even just curious users.
We wanted this to be a way for people to see why storytelling is important and how it could be introduced in a variety of ways by using our own testing and examples as case studies.
​
​
Take our
ideas and run with them!
Consider how existing features, technology and methods can be used in new manners which develop a new relationship between elements on the site, which might then be able to create new instances and opportunities for storytelling to occur.
We’d love to know what you’ll do with them and how you might adapt them into your own projects. So when you do, write to us and we’d love to check out how you’ve expanded on these ideas.
Gallery
See the journey we took to get here from starting this project, speaking to users and testing our ideas.
Visiting local craft markets to observe the interactions that took place within these spaces as well as the kind of stories exchanged
Conducting face to face interviews with buyers and sellers to understand their thoughts on storytelling and needs within the marketplace
Giving the users a series of 3 tasks to complete for user testing to understand the good and bad about the experience
Visiting local craft markets to observe the interactions that took place within these spaces as well as the kind of stories exchanged
About the Creator
Hey there! I'm Shaina, founder of the Market Project. A while ago I started this project because I wanted to introduce more ways to encourage users to tell and exchange stories in the online craft marketplace. My goal was to build a more inspiring environment and a stronger online community. So I set out to build a product to test my ideas and launched the Market App as a proof of concept. I then documented my findings and decision making in a case study site. This was how the Market Project was born. I hope to inspire more UX teams with my project to think about new ways that we can create opportunities for storytelling online because of the multitudinous benefits it offers.
