2nd Home — New Service Case Study
Overview
College students residing away from home often face frustration when seeking affordable furniture, particularly in urban areas where the cost of living is high.
Problem Statement
How might we make it easier for college students to buy, sell, and transport affordable furniture in NYC?
Collaboration
I’m so glad I got a chance to work with Sofia and Sahithi on this service design project. We all came from different cultural backgrounds, and this enabled us to view things from different perspectives as a team. Our diverse opinions have contributed significantly to our concept development.
Double Diamond Approach
Discover:
🎈 Educated assumptions
🎈 Observations
🎈 Preliminary research
🎈 MindMapping
Define:
📌 Narrow down target users
📌 Scope the problem
📌 Market research
📌 Ideate solutions
Develop:
🎨 Pushcart station ideation
🎨 Mobile app feature ideation
🎨 Mobile app interface design
Deliver:
🤖 Hi-fi prototype handoffs
🤖 Pushcart station mockup
🤖 Market strategy planning
Discover
Before landing on our current concept, we started the discovery phase of the service design process by coming up with a long list of common challenges faced by New Yorkers based on our educated assumptions and observations. Some of the topics we’ve touched upon include:
- Mental Health
- Furniture Trade
- Food & Security
- Public Restrooms
- etc…
As we dive deeper into the problem space, we conducted our preliminary research and compared the pain points most New Yorkers experienced.
Here’s a mind map that groups topics into common theme and visualizes the relationship between them.
Define
Following extensive discussions and interviews, our team noticed that there is a substantial demand for affordable furniture, particularly among college students who live in New York City. This presents a significant market opportunity for us to capitalize on. As a result, we decided to narrow down our target users to focus on college students, and scoped our problem to “How might we make it easier for college students to buy, sell, and transport affordable furniture in NYC?”
During our interviews with students on their experience of getting affordable furniture, some insights stood out to us:
In order to design a desirable and feasible service that helps college students access and transport furniture more quickly in the city, we conducted further in-depth research to analyze the market and direct & indirect competitors.
The competitors we identified include the Facebook Marketplace, TooGoodtoGo, and Depop.
Since we found from our user research that college students felt a lot better about furniture that was pre-owned by other college students over strangers on Facebook Marketplace, we believe the sense of trust can be one of the key motivations behind why college students would choose our app over similar services like the Facebook Marketplace.
Below is a table that compares the UI, audience, primary use case, transaction process, market presence, challenges, and opportunities across the existing services:
We also pictured our primary target users in a persona and their possible touch points with our potential concept.
The fictional character we came up with is Alex. He’s a junior college student who lives in New York City. He’s currently pursuing his studies in the Integrated Digital Media (IDM) program at NYU Tandon and works as an office assistant on campus.
Alex is excited that he just moved into a new apartment, but he’s frustrated to find out that there’s no chair and desk in his apartment, so he searches online and is shocked to see the expensive furniture. He ended up considering the old furniture and found our product.
It’s time to brainstorm and determine our solution!
There are so many exciting ideas. However, not all ideas will work out, given the consideration of effectiveness and time to MVP (minimum viable products) below:
Since the concept of a shareable pushcart has the highest effectiveness and requires the least time to MVP according to the prioritization matrix, we’ve decided to include the pushcart idea as one of the key features in our mobile app that aims to connect buyers and sellers.
Develop
Ideation never stops. After determining our solution, we started designing our mobile app — Meet “2nd Home”!
Starting with low-fidelity sketches, I came up with the main features and designed the main user flows. Below is the earliest iteration of the app. After talking to our friends and some students at NYU, we found that a chat feature for buyers and sellers to communicate is expected and desired by our potential users.
I then took a further step to develop the sketches into a mid-fidelity wireframe that better represented the user’s flow and navigation within the app. Here are some sample screens:
The app will serve as a central platform for sellers and buyers to connect that features:
- Easy Setup: With a quick onboarding, this app can be used by both buyers and sellers.
- Quick Switching: Users can explore free furniture from nearby neighbors and switch between buyer and seller by simply switching the toggle on the home page once they sign up.
- Flexible options: Depending on the distance, people can choose from Pickup or Delivery on the product details page.
- Accessible Map: Allows users to quickly identify the nearest push cart stations anytime, anywhere in NYC.
Mash-Up Technique
I gained inspiration for the sharable pushcart by using the Mash-up technique we learned in class. This method brings odd or unexpected things together to spark fresh ideas. We took advantage of the Mash-up technique while brainstorming. The Mash-up is what gets ridiculous ideas flowing.
Just like how the drive-in theater combines the concepts of a movie theater with a parking lot, I combined the ideas of CITI bike, airport luggage carts, and TooGoodtoGo together and came up with this brand new concept.
What does it look like?
Introducing the 2nd Home Station! A place for you to borrow and return push carts anytime, anywhere, to transport furniture in New York City. Below are mockups I’ve made to illustrate the design concepts we are envisioning:
We also work with shipping companies to provide affordable delivery services. Our service provider will be “The Piece of Cake LLC.”
Deliver — Handoffs!
After several rounds of meetings and usability testing, we gained the team alignment and finally delivered the handoff — the high-fidelity prototypes.
Once you download the app, you’ll be taken to a simple sign-up page to get started. You can select whether you want to be a seller or buyer and be able to switch your role anytime on the home page. Here, you will be given several categories to choose from, and you can select multiple categories simultaneously.
The search results are populated based on the distance from the users. You can see the furniture under each category by switching between the tabs. To learn more details, simply click on any furniture you wish to have.
On the product detail page, you can learn more about the furniture by checking the conditions and contacting the seller if you have any questions. The app also provides an option for you to select pickup or delivery. Since we are mainly targeting the college community, we’ve provided pickup as a more affordable option for students. If you’ve selected “Pickup” and checked the box to borrow a pushcart, a map will show you the nearest 2nd Home station once you’ve confirmed your furniture request on the ordering page.
Here’s a video that showcases the experience from the users’ perspective:
We used a chair as the physical prototype for pushcart while delivering our pitch:
Takeaway — Lessons Learned
I learned a lot from working with my team. The following are some of my takeaways:
- Collaborations amplify success: Teamwork can make us achieve more than we could on our own.
- Scoping matters: it ensures a project’s feasibility, desirability, and viability. It helps us determine if our goal can be achieved, whether people actually want it, and if the concept will work in the real world. It’s about making sure our ideas are not just dreams but things that make sense and can happen.
- In-depth research can exist at any stage of the product life cycle: Digging deep with research analysis can help us stay on the right track and keep improving. You should always keep that research game strong, no matter where you are in your project journey!
Challenges
Although we’ve encountered multiple challenges along the way, it was definitely worth it. Among all, perhaps balancing the desirability and feasibility of users is one of the biggest design challenges our team has encountered while deciding which feature to include. Since each of us has a unique strength, sometimes we may have different opinions on the “best feature” that is most feasible. However, since we all are great listeners, we managed to quickly resolve many of the issues and reach an agreement with the help of the prioritization matrix.
Feedback & Future Steps
We received a lot of detailed and informative feedback from our professor and the class.
Some points that were raised during the Q&A session at the end of our presentation include our sellers’ motivations, the funding sources of our pushcarts, the mechanism in place to ensure the availability of pushcarts, and our collective decision behind using distance to rank furniture & push cart stations based on user research.
One of our fellow classmates has expressed their concerns about security and privacy. To address this issue, we plan to verify the buyers’ and sellers’ identities using government-issued IDs. Users who have verified their identity will have a badge next to their profile image.
In terms of our next steps, we wish to get additional insights from more college communities in NYC to get further validations and see if our concept is still feasible, desirable, and viable.
The following are some steps we plan to implement:
- Improve our current push cart infrastructure by providing additional types of push carts for users to choose from
- Enhance the visualizations of furniture through AR (augmented reality)
- Expand our current user bases by introducing 2nd Home to other communities
- Work with the city officials to add more 2nd stations across the five boroughs
- Have partnerships with other businesses & non-profit organizations
- Conduct more extensive user research and market research
