Washi,a laundry app

Gise Bertran

Published in

Fluxyeah

4 min readOct 19, 2017

Timeline

2 weeks

Tools

Sketch
Typeforms.com
Flinto

Deliverables

User Research
Information Architecture
User Interface Design
Rapid Prototyping
User Testing

The vision

The overall laundry experience is a time-consuming task. In these days people often find themselves with less time and more work to do.They feel attracted to businesses that provide easy booking, pick up, and delivery at your doorstep, according to some studies.

It would be nice if people can get their clothes ready by simply tapping a smartphone. The idea is to change the way washing is done by creating a platform that allows people to request a laundry service from the comfort of their phone; so I came up with a laundry app idea.

The UX Research

I started my user research by checking the reviews about laundry services on Yelp . Reading the feedback gave me a better idea of how I should survey/interview the potentials users.

Survey

The survey was created in Typeform.com and taken by thirty people.

Audience

To get a better insight of whom my users were, I used Google Analytics identifying the audience demographic data.

Interviews

I interviewed five people at a laundromat. The conversation flowed on for an average of 35 minutes while they were washing their clothes. I was able to empathize with the user gaining knowledge in how is the washing experience for them and the challenges that this industry is facing.

Testimonials. What my users want?

“Honest service, the last time I used a laundry service they ripped my clothes a couple of times; their hours were all over the place”

“Door to door service, reasonable price so I can use it more frequently, they don’t ruin my clothed”

“You just wave a wand and it’s DONE, and put away in my home”“Update me on the status of my order”

Affinity Diagram

I used this tool to categorize, find patterns and possible design ideas from the user research in progress.

User-Pain Points

Based on the data collected from the user research the following pain points were identified:

Most of the people who took the survey don’t use laundry services because of the cost and poor handling which leads to their clothes being damaged.
Individuals who do use it like the speed of the process,the wash, fold and iron services provided
Individuals wish to have reliable pickup/drop off laundry service at an affordable price with folding and ironing options available.

User Personas

Based on the information acquired from the user so far I was able to create this user persona.

Problem Statement

The experience of washing clothes is not pleasant at all.
It’s time consuming, whether you do it at home or take it to the laundromat.
People don’t like to fold clothes and iron.
For them, it would be ideal to avoid the whole process in order to save time at an affordable price.

Washi Solutions

Schedule a pick-up/drop off according to their time.
Affordable price.
Multiple services(iron,fold).
Being updated about every step in the procedure.

Journey Maps

The use of this particular tool served me, not only to know each instance through which the user interacts with a laundromat but also to find out exactly where, when and how to act to get the user engage with the platform.

Marshal(23) interaction with a laundromat.

Marshal (23) interaction with Washi platform.

Information architecture

After the user research, information architecture was used to decide the best way to group content across the app.

Mobile application Site Map

Developing a sitemap for the application was helpful in visualizing how the product would function and also for the placement of certain elements within the user flows.

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Washi began to take shape and functionality could be seen.