SkillSwap.
Everyone can fix a faucet — after forty minutes of the wrong YouTube videos. SkillSwap is a concept for a crowdsourced app where neighbours teach and learn bite-sized, hyper-local life skills through 2-minute video clips — and trade knowledge instead of money.
SkillSwap is a self-initiated concept project. Metrics from testing rounds reflect prototype sessions, not a shipped product.
Tutorials are too long. Trust is too thin.
People wanting to fix a leaky tap or sew a button face a wall of 20-minute videos, ads, and advice from strangers they have no reason to trust. There's no platform for localized, practical knowledge exchange.
I designed a mobile app around three ideas: strictly 2-minute tutorials, AR guidance layered over your actual problem, and a Skill-Coin barter system so anyone can pay with what they know instead of what they earn.
Why is learning to unclog a sink so hard?
Practical life skills — small repairs, cooking basics, sewing, gardening — are exactly the knowledge the internet should be best at. Instead it's fragmented across long videos, paywalled courses, and forum threads of unknown quality.
Meanwhile the best teachers for these skills often live on your street: the retired teacher with forty years of gardening, the engineering student who fixes his own bike. They have no structured way to share what they know — and no incentive beyond goodwill.
What people told me
Surveys and short interviews with DIY learners — busy parents, students, and retirees — about how they learn practical skills today, and what stops them from sharing their own.
85% felt existing tutorials were too long for the problem at hand. Nobody wants a 20-minute video for a 2-minute fix.
72% wanted trusted, local solutions — region-specific repairs, local hardware quirks, advice from someone accountable to their community.
Skilled people were happy to teach, but had no incentive to share beyond money — and no lightweight format to do it in.
The gap nobody fills.
Everything is there, but buried under ads and videos of wildly uneven quality — and far longer than the task at hand.
Polished courses behind a paywall, aimed at creative careers — not practical life skills like "my sink is leaking right now."
The right people, the wrong format — local and trusted, but neighbourhood chatter with no structured way to teach or learn.
The opening: tutorials are time-consuming and unreliable, and skilled people have no incentive to share beyond money. Nobody combines short-form how-to content with local trust and a reason to teach — that intersection became SkillSwap.
Three people to design for.
Marketing manager in Austin. Needs quick DIY fixes for household problems and has zero time for vague, long videos. Trusts a rated local expert over an anonymous creator.
- Tutorials that get straight to the point
- Credible, community-vetted guidance
- Hands-on help without in-depth courses
Engineering student in Chicago. Learns skills to save money — fixes his bike instead of paying a shop. Dislikes paywalls and wants a community, not passive watching.
- Free, gamified learning on a budget
- To trade skills he has for skills he wants
- Quick answers from a community Q&A
Retired teacher in Portland with decades of gardening and repair knowledge. Loves teaching, finds modern apps confusing, and feels her expertise goes unasked-for.
- A dead-simple way to record and share
- Voice-over instead of typing
- One-on-one mentorship trades
How might we…
Enforce brevity — every tutorial is capped at 2 minutes, with an upload timer that makes long-winded content impossible.
Teach in context — AR annotations layered over the learner's actual faucet, hem, or bike, not a stranger's kitchen.
Make teaching worth it — Skill-Coins earned by teaching unlock other tutorials, so knowledge is currency.
Keep it local — feeds, search, and trades default to your area, so trust comes built in.
Structure before pixels.
The information architecture prioritized three surfaces: a home feed of trending and local skills, the AR annotation tool for in-context guidance, and the Skill-Coin exchange that powers the barter economy.
The core loop.
Tested, humbled, iterated.
Remote sessions with 15 participants across the three persona groups — students, parents, and retirees — working through the prototype's core tasks: find a tutorial, follow an AR guide, and set up a trade.
"Finally, an app that respects my time!"
— Beta tester, round 2
Did it work?
Takeaways: community platforms live or die on trust and simplicity; micro-interactions like Skill-Coins drive engagement more than features do; and localization turns generic content into practical help.
What I'd do next: validate the barter economy at scale (do coins inflate?), design the moderation and quality-rating flow for uploaded clips, and test partnerships with local hardware stores as skill hubs.