Improving Buy Nothing’s Map UI
Before Buy Nothing the app there were dedicated Facebook Groups for various neighborhoods where people could post things they were giving away for free. Once the app pulled together the various groups and created a central app, Buy Nothing as a concept started to take off amongst those who had an interest. One thing I noticed in my time using the app was that it could sometimes be hard to know how far someone was for pickup. Even if people provided addresses, I live in NYC there are plenty of cross streets im not familiar with. Something I saw as white space in the app was a better search function.
What I came up with from asking others who use the app the same question of “What do you think of the search function?” I came up with a map function that can populate the various posts onto a map using the available location data.
To achieve this more completely, the post creation prompt would add in a map API from Google to populate with the greatest accuracy. Each post would be represented by a green dot, with pop outs when clicked that show item name, description, urgency, type of object, difficulty, and the regular buttons in non map mode of “comment”, “like, “save”, “gift” and “I’m Interested”.