Aim

Design a calendar flow and interface that is smart enough to accommodate orders and tasks. times based on daily plans and is proactively working for a Thrift seller to make sure she is always on time and scheduled properly with her side hustle business.

Foundation

A good calendar is a handy addition to your smartphone, helping you stay on top of upcoming appointments, orders, and events, whether they’re personal or for work.

I will research on and document the process the best calendar or a mode of a scheduler/planner that will work great for a thrift seller and people selling online through Facebook, Whatsapp, and on Instagram.

Day in the life

The daily basis of a thrifter selling online are things like,

Getting new stock, Taking photos, listing them on Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp, chatting with customers, handling orders, delivering orders.

When they have an order they always want to keep their customers posted. Through text, dm, or phone call. They carry their phone everywhere in case of a new upcoming order or in case they need to speak to a new client.

While thriving for punctuality thrifters like to plan their day and how they want to carry out certain activities for a fast good and lasting impression on their customers and business process.

This will help sellers and automatically add to their tasks. When online thrift sellers get a client, they get them from various places. And since most of them can't handle all their deliveries once, they set up a system that works well with them. E.G when they get an order from Buruburu and another one in Ngong and so forth. The delivery charges usually are free within CBD on set dates.

Here sellers and thrift owners should be able to add certain tasks to their lists. Check them out when they are done. We can have reminders on them where they get notifications on daily tasks that were not completed.

Here we can automatically add new orders done to their closets. Reminders for listing new products and items to their stores and more.

Formulating a design process

I have formulated a set of design-aided principles that would form the underlying framework of the app to be successfully adopted by such user types:

Aiding healthier association by leveling up the concept of transparency between both the parties involved i.e a seller and a user purchasing from them.

Providing symbolic means of companionship by proving to become a go-to tool for convenience while reducing the cognitive load of the user, getting new stock when realizing their selling, and getting inventory reduced.

Achieving seamless transition between multiple channels of engagement and resultantly aiding in multi-faceted convenience by integrating necessary third-party applications into the app’s information structure. i.e new orders, events by roko, delivered products, etc.

Key features.

In order to flesh out my ideas for the smart calendar app, I have listed out some key features that would help me prioritize the important functions of the app that would aid users to achieve the goals, as mentioned above:

A simple timeline view of the days for a given month which prioritizes the upcoming/past appointments/orders events, coupled with a collapsible calendar dropdown with a “heat map” view to show which days are busy and which are free, in a quick glance (due to paucity of time for completing the challenge),

Creation of automated orders, meetings/appointments with a feature to maintain email-based communication to fetch order data from there and create event with a single tap. Seller opening a new order from their calendar. Which shows the current status.

Edge Cases

Quick actions on alert based push notifications, for any given day’s plan, to navigate to the orders and tasks needed the client for being late, without having to enter the app and search for the meeting entry on the calendar, is accounted for while sketching out the ideas