VendGo

the vendors worth finding don't show up on Google

Local markets, pop-up shops, and craft vendors are some of the most interesting parts of a city, and they're basically invisible online. Yelp and Google Maps are built for brick-and-mortar businesses with fixed addresses. If you want to find your favorite food truck or that jewelry vendor from last month's market, your best bet is a friend who already knew about them.

We wanted to change that which is how this whole app idea started for our project. The goal was to build something that actually served both sides of this community: shoppers looking for local finds and vendors trying to reach them.

getting to know the problem firsthand

Before opening Figma, we ran interviews and surveys with fellow classmates to build a real picture of how people discover local vendors and what was getting in the way. We wanted to understand the who, what, why, and how of our target audience: who was actually looking for local vendors, what they were trying to do, why current tools kept falling short, and how they go about finding local businesses today.

From those conversations, we built user personas to give our findings a face and a story. Creating specific personas helped us stay anchored to real people throughout the rest of the process rather than designing for abstract assumptions. We also mapped out recurring pain points from the research, from algorithm-buried social posts to having to check multiple platforms just to find out if a market was even open that weekend. Those pain points became the foundation for every feature decision we made going forward.

• Interviews and surveys with classmates revealed that word of mouth was still the dominant way people heard about local vendors, not apps or search engines
• User personas helped us address the needs of both shoppers browsing for local finds and vendors trying to build a consistent audience outside of social media
• Pain point mapping surfaced recurring frustrations: fragmented discovery across platforms, unpredictable social reach for vendors, and no single place to track local events

brainstorming: getting everything out of our heads

Before anyone started sketching, we ran a full brainstorming session in FigJam. We mapped out user needs, feature ideas, and pain points all at once without filtering anything yet. This session is where we landed on the core features we knew the app had to have: vendor discovery, a filter system, vendor profiles, and accessibility options like dark mode.

Having everyone contribute to the same board early on meant we were aligned on direction before splitting into individual workstreams. It made the handoff to lo-fi a lot smoother.

lo-fi wireframes: two rounds, one team

Once we had our feature list, each team member took ownership of a different section of the app and sketched lo-fi versions of what those flows could look like. Splitting up the features meant we could cover more ground quickly and bring different perspectives to the same problem before coming back together.

We went through two full rounds of low-fidelity wireframes. The first round was about getting ideas down and figuring out what was missing. The second incorporated feedback and refined layout and flow before we moved into high-fidelity. Each round was reviewed with real people, which led to some real structural changes before we ever touched color or type.

color and branding: setting the visual direction

Deciding on the visual identity was one of the more collaborative parts of the project. We chose a muted olive green as our primary color because local markets are outdoor, organic spaces. Green communicates freshness and community without the sterile feel of a tech-forward palette. A warm terracotta accent nods to the handmade, artisan character of the vendor scene. Together they felt authentic to the kind of people and places the app was built around.

We built out a shared component library in Figma to keep everything consistent as we worked in parallel. Every button, card, icon, and input state was defined and documented before we started applying them to screens. Having that system in place made it much easier to stay aligned as a team and move faster through the high-fidelity phase without second-guessing visual decisions.

high-fidelity: where it all came together

The high-fidelity prototype brought together everything we had learned across the lo-fi process, testing feedback, and branding work. Every screen was designed with a real user task in mind, and the visual polish came after the structure was solid.

dark mode: built in from the start

Dark mode wasn't an afterthought. We scoped it into the project early and treated it as an equally important version of the experience. We adjusted contrast ratios across every screen, tested text legibility in low-light conditions, and made sure our olive green and terracotta palette translated just as well on dark backgrounds as it did on light ones. Every interactive state, icon, and text level was reviewed to make sure the dark version held up the same way the light version did.

8 tasks, real feedback, honest results

Each participant was asked to navigate through our prototype and complete 8 tasks. We used the System Usability Scale to measure how intuitive the experience felt overall. The results pointed us toward clear areas to improve.

Tasks participants completed:

• Task 1: Sign up and make an account on VendGo
• Task 2: Like an event
• Task 3: RSVP for an event
• Task 4: Check an event host's profile
• Task 5: Check your own user profile
• Task 6: Check upcoming events
• Task 7: Find a vendor's products
• Task 8: Filter out searches

Plans for Improvement

Based on user suggestions and critique, we compiled a list of changes to address in our next iteration, as well as new features to explore:

Takeaways From Testing

1. Most tasks were completed with a 100% success rate, except "Check Your Profile" and "Check Upcoming Events"
2. The app scored below average usability on the SUS, pointing to real structural issues we needed to address
3. The User Profile and Event Host pages were hard for users to tell apart
4. There was confusion between the Events Page, Upcoming Events Page, and the Calendar
5. Certain text needed more contrast for readability
6. Nav bar icons needed adjustment so users could tell when they were on or off a page
7. Users wanted better tools to sort and filter information
8. More buttons to confirm completion and return to previous pages were needed