Hagglebuddy is an Android app with smartwatch capabilities designed to meet the needs of travelers who have never haggled before.

There are two main goals of the app:

1. To help users become more familiar with bargaining for goods in foreign countries (with the indirect aid of an experienced friend)
2. To protect target users from being taken advantage of (by providing a database of what kind of prices to expect and aim for)

Our team conducted a contextual inquiry of users haggling at a flea market, and also used wizard-of-oz techniques with our Balsamiq prototype to test iterations of our app before settling on our final, streamlined result. The app went onto win first place in the class-wide competition at the end of the summer session for its creativity.

Haggling is an essential skill in many foreign markets, yet it is very difficult to master quickly and almost impossible without physical experience. After all, there are multiple variables involved, including gauging the worth of the item you want, interacting with a real vendor, and negotiating the price you want — all in a foreign and unfamiliar environment, with different customs, different currency, and even a different language system! Skilled hagglers will spend an entire day at a local market, comparing prices, getting to know vendors, and cutting down prices, but often travelers do not have that kind of time. Applications that teach this skill are rare (if any exist at all).

HaggleBuddy is an app that hopes to bridge this gap through well-informed data on prices from other users and indirect coaching from a more experienced haggler.

The app provides information ahead of time on a seller's merchandise, reviews of the products, and the prices that previous travellers have purchased or negotiated for the item, travelers get a quick comparison of the value of the goods in a marketplace.

The app also caters to novices by featuring a "buddy system" that allows the user to pair up with a friend who has more experience in the local markets to give them advice while they attempt to bargain for the price they desire. This alleviates some of the awkwardness of appearing like an ignorant foreigner by allowing a friend to remotely and subtly advise the user via smartwatch notifications.

We used Balsamiq to fleshed out our ideas. The following depicts our initial low-fidelity prototypes:

Members of our team went to a local Starbucks and asked random people to test our app using a wizard-of-oz technique. We chose a few basic tasks and tested how long it would take users to complete the scenarios we had set.

We interviewed three people total.

A summary of our results:

We revised out interface design based on design critique from our instructors and feedback from users to be more streamlined. Some of the changes we made included scrapping a few features and reducing the amount of navigation between screens during the buddy system.

We then took our designs and created our high-fidelity prototype to serve as a demo in our final presentation.

Our work culminated in a final presentation for the end-of-session showcase to the entire class of CS 160 and a demo session after for the general public.

Some potential features we would like to implement in the future include a Google Maps integration, price types (e.g., lowest user-paid price, average user-paid price), timestamping, remote buddy system, user profile, and global search.

If you would like to read more, detailed write-ups created during the process of building the app can be found on Hackster, including a contextual inquiry / task analysis / competitive analysis, a low-fi prototype video, an interactive prototype (including our hand-drawn scenario cases and more of our non-implemented features), and our final code and video.

This post is now on Medium!