James came to me in August 2016 to help him create a new business idea – CollegeConnect. CollegeConnect is an eBay/Gumtree website serving students at U.S. Universities.
The first task on the project was to take all of James’ business ideas and turn them into a functional set of requirements. This was done to make it clear what would be delivered, and when. James had lots of ideas about what the site could be and what it could do but it was important to ensure that the core process was sound before any further features were built. Once the requirements were complete we then worked with Scott Jones to create the designs.
Add a Listing
The site relies on users adding listings and therefore it was important that we made this as simple as possible. We did this by creating a distraction-free process which made it clear if the user had filled out form fields with the correct data.
Messaging
James wanted a social element to the site – he wanted to make it easy for users to message one another about listings before they bought or borrowed them. I created a custom messaging system to handle this by setting up custom tables to handle the data and not clog up the posts table which is very important for performance when the sites become heavily used.
James Steyn, 
