Spree is a hyperlocal student-to-student mobile commerce application.
Spree was started by myself and Marco Ciccone in late 2014 with the vision of enabling students to sell secondhand items like textbooks and furniture to other students, using only their smartphones.
By March 2015, I had developed a prototype iOS application that allowed users to login with their school email addresses, post items, and communicate with each other.
In May 2015, we won the grand prize at Santa Clara University's First Annual Business Pitch Competition.
In late May 2015, the initial release of Spree was approved for the Apple App Store.
As of May 2017, Spree is no longer available for download on the Apple App Store, but read below for a description of the project and press received.
The project recieved a good deal of attention in the Santa Clara University press.
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Santa Clara Magazine, Spring 2016
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Santa Clara Leavey School of Business, Jan 2016
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Santa Clara University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, May 2015
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The Santa Clara, October 2015
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The Santa Clara, May 2015
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Her Campus, June 2015
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Th3Clara.com, June 2015
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SCU eNews, Summer 2015
In December 2014, I began researching how I might build an app that would allow users to post an item to Spree, and browse for items to purchase, and contact each other when needed. Parse, a now defunct backend as a service (BaaS), was selected for the backend of the app because I had worked with it previously while developing another iOS application, SceneScope, and it was a great way to quickly get the app up and running.
The initial version of Spree contained a tab bar with three different views: "All", "Categories", and "More". Posts could be created while browsing in the All tab within a basic 'post creation' view that prompted users to fill in information on what they would like to sell. The fields included "Title", "Price", "Description", with other fields like "Class" when posting a textbook for sale. Also, users were able to include up to three photos of the item they were selling by selecting the "Add Photo" buttons on the bottom of their screen.
In the next major iteration of the app, a "Messages" tab was added to the tab bar to allow users to contact each other within the app. Previously, the users were forced to contact each other outside of the app interface, leading to a clumsy, less sticky experience.
In Summer 2015, the onboarding and new post creation workflow was completely overhauled to better the user experience and expand the functionality of the app. Also, we chose to simplify the color palette, opting for the use of simple grey and white tints with blue as a minor accent color.
The new post workflow was revamped, trading the single view for a multiview workflow that dynamically presented views based on what type of item was being posted for sale.
