PassItForward
A community-driven platform that makes giving away unwanted items as effortless as selling them — built around trust, neighborhood connections, and reducing uncertainty throughout every stage of the exchange.
My Role
• Competitive Analysis
• User Interviews
• Journey map
• Ideation
• User Flow
• Wireframes (Post Feature)
• Mid-Fidelity Prototype (Post Feature)
• High-Fidelity Prototypes
(Post Page)
• Usability Testing
Timeline
3 months
September 3 – November 28
Team
UX , Product, and Research Teams
Overview
PassItForward: A community-driven platform for giving away unwanted items
PassItForward is a community platform designed to make giving away items as effortless as selling them. Rather than creating another marketplace, we designed PassItForward around three core principles: build trust first, encourage neighborhood connections, and reduce uncertainty throughout every stage of the exchange. The project followed a full UX process from research through high-fidelity prototype and usability testing.
Problem Statement
The process for giving away unwanted items presents potential struggles and risks that can largely surround trust and safety, which in result generates excessive waste that could be prevented
Why should we care about this?
Solution
Process
Okay but wait....how did we get here?
Competitive Analysis
Most competitors only addressed one part of our problem when it came to giving away items
Before designing PassItForward, we analyzed existing community and marketplace platforms to understand how people currently give away unwanted items. We evaluated competitors based on community, trust, and ease of rehoming to uncover opportunities beyond feature comparisons.
Can feel trustworthy (largely community based) but is very unstructured and informal
Provided more structure and intentionality, but largely felt transactional/can be risky
Intentions towards being community based and structured, but not accessible
User Interviews
We interviewed 5 participants with experience buying, selling, donating, or picking up secondhand items to understand how people navigate local exchanges.
We wanted to understand: why people donate instead of sell, what influences trust, pickup frustrations, safety concerns, and communication habits.
Insights
There needs to be some type of buyer protection and a way to verify people
Many interviewees voiced having trouble trusting users online
My preferred method is local meetup. It can feel unsafe doing porch pick up at times — a local meetup is more supervised
Common concerns include the actual transaction experience safety
The price, the pictures, the quality, and the seller's profile — if they seem safe, have previous items they have sold
Reassurance about item quality heavily influences behavior — users won't pursue pickups unless they think it's worth the effort
Journey map
Users were encountering these pain points in 3 major stages of their journey, being when they are searching and looking for item listings, when they are messaging donators, and when they are coordinating pickups
We mapped the complete journey — from deciding to give away an item to completing pickup — to identify where uncertainty prevented users from following through. Anxiety peaked during communication and pickup. Small uncertainties accumulated throughout the experience. Users needed confidence more than convenience. These findings shifted our focus away from improving discovery alone and toward reducing uncertainty through verification, richer listings, reputation systems, and simpler pickup coordination.
How might we & IDEATION
How might we provide verification when it comes to users, transaction experiences, and items in the most effective way for platform users who want to give items away — in order to reduce waste and support the recycling of items.
ideation
Starting from the friction points surfaced in research, we generated a range of ideas to address uncertainty at each stage — from initial discovery through post-pickup accountability. We aimed for quantity before converging on the concepts most aligned with our core principle of building trust first.
USER FLOW
Designing the flow around trust checkpoints, not just task completion.
Rather than optimizing purely for speed, we structured the user flow to surface trust signals at each critical moment — before browsing, during discovery, when messaging, and after pickup. The flow was intentionally designed to allow users to: verify identity, discover items confidently, coordinate pickup with clarity, and build reputation over time.
WIREFRAMES & Mid-fidelity
Designing a post creation experience that naturally incorporates detailed item description selections
And so when moving into wireframing, I wanted to reflect how a user would go about adding a listing to a free marketplace app (so selecting whether it would be a give or ask listing, adding post images, selecting general location area for the pickup, etc.), and I wanted to do this in order to maintain the industry standard, but while naturally incorporating features that would allow for more detailed item descriptions
VISUAL DESIGN
Designing for Confidence
Our visual language was intentionally designed to balance friendliness and trust, reinforcing the community-driven nature of the platform while helping users feel confident completing exchanges.
Design Principles: Community · Transparency · Simplicity
high-fidelity
PassItForward
A trust-first community giving experience.
USABILITY TESTING
Goal: Validate whether our trust-centered experience helped users confidently complete common tasks.
We wanted to understand: why people donate instead of sell, what influences trust, pickup frustrations, safety concerns, and communication habits.
Insights
REFLECTION & NEXT STEPS
Keep reading...
iMajor
UX Design