Easyshift: Simplifying relocations through tech. A ux design case study.
A Walkthrough of how I designed a solutions for students to relocate.
Project Overview
In Educational institutes like colleges and university students take admission from different cities and states and travel with their luggage to complete their degrees .In this scenario they usually depends on their relatives or friends to help them shift their belongings. Usually no packers and movers wants to shift small items in less quantity. As a result students have no option but to transport through packers and mover who charge them high for the services
The Problem
Students don’t have a reliable service provider who can transport their luggage safely, hassle free and in cheap cost. As no service provider is
ready to shift their small items.
Roles and Responsibilities
As a part of 3 months ux/ui course at Designers academy. I worked on this project. The problem brief was provided by designers.
As the only ux/ui designer on this project my responsibilities included everything end to end, following all the aspect of design thinking. Right from doing user research , designing solutions to conducting usability tests
I designed fully functional prototype.
Target Audience
The target audience for provided in problem brief. The target audience consisted of college students and working professionals.
Design Process
In order to design a solutions for this problem I followed the ‘Design thinking process
1.Empathize
To design the best solutions I had to empathize with the users. By conducting both secondary and primary research, I was able to
understand the user’s actual needs and pain points.
Secondary research
Before directly going on the internet, I wanted to define the goals of my research to understand the scope of the problem and not to lose sight of the project
Goals of secondary Research
1.understanding workflow of packers and mover.
2. location of institute and colleges pan India.
3.types of products that needs to be shifted.
4. How should be price Decided.
With these defined goals in mind, I started researching online articles, study papers and ended up with lots of insights regarding relocation
industry in general. Revisiting the problem space of this project, I cut
out the extra ‘add on’ type information and summarized the actual insights
that will help me proceed with my primary research.
Secondary Research Insights
1. Understood typical process involved in relocation
2. mostly all the institute and colleges are located in tier 1 and tier 2 cities
3. Price is mostly decide on urgency of delivery, distance and time required.
Primary research
With the secondary research insights in hand, it was now time to validate
them by obtaining first hand information from the actual users themselves. So I conducted user interviews to learn more about the different experiences people have had in shifting process.
Planning for the interviews, I first created a questionnaire that was based around the actual context of the problem. I recruited around around 5 participants ageing from 20–25 for the interview.
Some Questions i asked in interview
1 .Can you tell me about the last time you used a packer and movers service?
2.What were the common challenges you faced while using packers and movers services?
3.What features or functionalities do you consider most important in a packers and movers platform?
4.Would you recommend the packers and movers service you used to others? and why?
5.have you ever lost your valuable items in the process?
6. How did you find the packers and movers service provider you used? what were the keyword used on google search
7.How do you prefer to communicate with packers and movers service providers?
8.If you could change or improve one thing about packers and movers services, what would it be?
2.Define
In the first phase, I empathized with the users. Now based on my research
insights, I have to establish a clear idea of exactly which problems to solve for my users.
Affinity Mapping
After the interview, I gathered all the users statements and then sorted them into groups, based on their natural relationships.
I divided the data into 4 categories those were: how did they find the service provider, when was the last time they used this service,
recommendation to others and communication mode. This helped in uncovering the major common pain points of the users and prioritizing them.
Insights Obtained
1.People mostly use this service once in a year or two year
2.People prefer to directly call the customer support rather than having conversation with chatbot
3.mostly people find the service provider online on google search engine
4.people would usually recommend the service provider to other due to various reason
User Persona
From the insights gathered, I observed common patterns of goals and pain
points for the majority of the target audience. Putting those insights, I created one persona which will be my primary persona.
3. Ideate
In order to ideate the possible solutions, I first wanted to find where exactly the users face the hurdles in their journey. So in this phase, I mapped out the current state experience of the user and started creating the flows for the app that fills the gap of the current experience.
User Experience Map
Even with the main goals and pain points in hand, I still had to map out the journey the users take, to see where exactly they face these ‘pain points’ and eliminate them to create a seamless experience.
Starting from planning stage till booking of service, I mapped out the typical physical experience that my primary persona would take based on the insights I gathered from actual users.
I was able to identify the places where the experience was being broken and the users had difficulties.
Identified Places for improvement
Communication: Providing more proactive communication during the move
Post Sales Services: enhancing post-move follow-up to ensure customer satisfaction.
User Flows
With the understanding of how the user’s journey was using the experience map, I created user flows for the app that will fill the gaps in the physical journey of the end user.
Login into App
To use the app user will have to login into the app. user have two choices either login with phone number or login as guest
Institute search
once the user has logged in they might have to choose a place to move in/out on basis of this i created this task flow
to choose institute with date.
Sitemaps
Observing the created user flows, I was able to identify the main entry point screens. Using those screens as a base and taking reference from the user flows, I was able to create a sitemap for the app which helped me to understand the overall flow and the structure of the application.
4. Design
In this fourth phase of the design thinking process, I started creating low fidelity wireframes. After many iterations, I finalized one version and converted them to high fidelity wireframes. I also prototyped them so that it can be tested out with the users in the testing phase.
High fidelity wireframes
After finalizing the low fidelity wireframes, I added details to the existing wireframes by putting the content information and upgrading the components.
Style Guide — Color & Typography
To create a color palette that’ll evoke a good mood in the users while they use the app, I made a mood board which consisted of images of people moving their items. The colors that were extracted from it were mostly blue and yellow. The final chosen color palette also passed the contrast checker with a very high ratio.
Considering the possible use cases where the app will mostly be used (indoors), the typeface had to be highly readable . After exploring lots of typefaces, the Nunito Sans was chosen because of its legibility and distinct letter forms.
The text in the app had to be readable for all of the target audience which ranged from ages 20–25. With careful considerations of accessibility, the body text size was set to 16 pts.
Final UI
Applying the style guide to my final high-fidelity wireframes, I started creating the UI mockups.
5.Test
It was time to test the live prototype with potential users and check how the users respond to it. Based on the testing insights, I will decide if the designs needs to be altered or not.
Moderated Usability testing
After creating the final screens, I conducted a moderated usability testing with 3 participants that fit my target audience. I wanted to see how my users perceive the app’s main features such as,
Booking a service
Login Flow
Selecting date and location
With keeping these goals in mind, I created a few tasks and prepared a questionnaire to follow during the testing session. Some of the scenarios given to the participants are,
Scenario #1
You are shifting to other city for higher education you want to book packers and movers services.
Scenario #2
After booking the service you start reviewing the details . now you want to make the payment for the booking
the service
Findings
In the usability testing it was found that the tab consisting of between cities and within cities needs to be changed
Learning and Takeaways
While working on this project, I realized how important it is to conduct the research to develop clean and good user interface. Discovering that most
of the students had major issue of shifting their small items. So through my app i tried to provide them solutions .