An investigation into improving consumers access to locally produced goods using web technologies
Buy Local is an aggregation ecommerce platform for local producers. It provides a place to sell locally produced products directly to consumers online. With online sales increasing in Ireland, “Irish consumers spend around €850,000 per hour online, 24 hours a day” (Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment 2016) and with many local producers having no to little online presence, there is a need to help local producers reach a larger audience online and provide consumers with better and unrestricted access to locally produced products.
Many local producers have a minimal online presence, mainly in the form of promotion and in odd cases an ecommerce website. Buy Local allows them to promote and sell online. Buy Local is a collaborate space for multiple local producers to get online and reach a larger market.
This project’s core focus was on interaction design and front-end development. There was emphasis placed on consideration for the user, branding, design and development.
Initially, research was completed on the market and target audiences to gain a greater insight into what is currently available and what are the requirements, this led into completing user and interaction design reseach. Below is an image showcasing some of the data gathered for the project. Data was gather through primary and secondary research. Secondary research included data from digital reports while Primary research included:
From protoyping, there were design changes based on the requirements, these changes can be seen below showing the 3 stages of design iterations from sketches, to Low-Fidelity Prototyping created using Balsamiq and High-Fidelity Prototyping created using Marvel App.
With prototyping completed design and branding were decided based on the prototpes and user testing on the prototypes. Branding was tested to see what users thoughts were and what appealed more to the target market.
With research, design and branding, the project moved forward into development. This project was creating using HTML5, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL.