Designing an on-demand storage app —a UX case study
Overview
Spaceship Storage is a Dropbox of your physical items. It’s an early-stage startup that operates in Singapore and offers on-demand storage — customers can store their items and retrieve them whenever needed. Unlike traditional self-storage businesses where customers have to arrange transportation to the storage location by themselves, Spaceship offers hassle-free scheduling and delivery of items.
The goal of the project was to create a mobile app for Spaceship customers that allows them to manage their items, schedule and track deliveries.
Role and duration
Role: Product Manager / Designer
Involvement: Research, Information Architecture, Interaction, Visual design & testing, Product management, Project management
Team: 3 developers and product manager/designer
Timeline: Aug 2017 — Oct 2017
The problem
Customer needs:
- Convenience. Especially when it comes to moving their items from and to storage.
- Affordable storage - pay for space usage
- Access their items when they need to
- Know what’s in storage
Business need:
- Increase customer base
- Communicate effectively it’s competitive pricing to customers
- Gain long term competitive advantage
- Improve customer loyalty
- Streamline the operations
In order for storage providers to remain competitive in the market, branching out on extra services and innovation is key to differentiate their offerings in the market. Spaceship Storage has full capacity to provide necessary information to customers thanks to its own warehouse management and fleet management software. However, it’s a missing user interface to make this information accessible to customers.
Some facts
- 28% of support tickets are related to inquiries about item content
- Operations manager spend 37.5% of their time to coordinate delivery schedules between customers and ground team
- 58% of all delivery cancellations and no shows are related to lack of reminders and notifications
Challenges
Process
Workshop
A 5-day workshop was conducted with the Spaceship stakeholders, sales managers, customer support executives, operations managers, and ground workers. My research encompassed:
• Create a current customer journey map
• Roles and responsibilities of members at each touchpoint
• Day to Day tasks that need to be accomplished
• How is the success of the tasks measured
Research
It was important to understand the behavior and context of our target audience in order to build the best experience for them. I started with qualitative user research to find what type of users we have and what are their biggest pain points when using self-storage services.
Insights
- The top reason given by personal users for using self-storage space is the relocation to a smaller home (67.9%). The next biggest contributor is a new addition to the family.
- Top 3 considerations when selecting self-storage services are long term storage discount, price, and location.
- 21% of total customers retrieve their items at least once per month.
Output
After synthesizing information gathered from different sources, there were 4 user personas that have been created all of which have different needs and objectives. Those personas are:
The rich data collected during user research sessions allowed to better understand users mental models and environment which influence their decision-making process. The following artifacts were created in order to document the research findings and share it across the team for future use: detailed user persona, empathy maps, and user journey map.
Based on customer attributes we found out that 86% of our customers fall into 2 persona — Jennifer and Ji Yun. This knowledge helped to prioritize and scope the work as we focused on the customer journey of these 2 groups of users.
A user journey mapping workshop was conducted in order to have a holistic view of what the customer is going through from their point of view. The journey was created with Jennifer and Ji Yun as a target audience. With inputs from the operations, marketing and support team and qualitative research, the most critical gaps and opportunities for improvement were discovered.
The entire user journey for self-storage service is long. Most customers on average start searching for storage 2 months ahead. The storage duration also varies from 1 month to more than 2 years. The MVP of the app was targeting existing customers who have already have ordered storage services online through the website. The scope of MVP included 3 highlighted stages of the user journey:
- Pickup — items get collected, registered in the system and places in the warehouse.
- Storage — items are stored in the warehouse and the information about them is available in the system.
- Delivery — items get retrieved and storage subscription is terminated.
Concept
I started creating the information architecture and outlining user journeys for primary use cases. This was a good starting point to initiate discussion on what we consider to be a good user flow and what implications it can have on the operations.
After a few iterations of the user flow, I started working on low-fidelity mockups in Sketch, which basically meant replacing each stage of user flow with the low-fi design. After having a go-ahead from the CEO, and stakeholders on the mockups, we began to conduct usability tests with the low-fidelity prototypes. Few major flows in user experience were discovered:
- Users didn’t know how to initiate termination of service. Even when he tried to retrieve all items from storage, it was not clear whether his subscription has been canceled or not.
- Users expect their actual schedule to be the same as what they indicated on the preferred date.
- When rushing through scheduling retrieval flow, users mistakenly confirm the wrong address, which was selected by default.
Once we found and fixed the common usability problems we found during testing it was time to move to the next level of fidelity.
Final design
In order to have a smooth transition of users from the website to the mobile app, the design was kept consistent throughout different platforms. In this case, the mobile app followed the existing website’s design directions: imagery, typography, and spacing with minor adjustments.
Results
- 2.5X increase in referral rate due to an increase of customer satisfaction
- 86% less communication(both email and phone calls) for scheduling delivery
- The spaceship was able to get another series A of investment in the following 4 months after the launch of a consumer app.
Lessons learned
This was a challenging yet fun project for me and the team. As part of a startup team, everyone has to focus on the end goal: creating a smooth and delightful user experience. With limited resources sometimes it means that you have to go beyond their job description and be creative.
Building a great experience is teamwork. Instead of telling developers what to do, I persuaded my boss to engage them in the user research and testing processes. Not only it saved me time to communicate the outcomes of those sessions, but the most important — developers came up with some of the best ideas.
Artifacts are only helpful if they are being used. We have printed all of the artifacts which were created as a result of user research and workshop and put it in the visible place. It was a great visual cue for us, especially in the moment of heated debates, to always get back to question: “What is the best for users?”
Do less. Some of the big issues we found were discovered quite late in the development process when we started working with real data. One example of such issue is fetching information from the server took a very long time. We used a 3rd party tool for inventory management and didn’t plan to move away from it very soon. So instead of delaying MVP by trying to solve backend issues, we added loading animation with an indication of loading time, so that users have the right expectation. Of course, the speed was still an issue, but we decided to solve one problem at a time and put that issue to the next iteration.
