Role
End-to-end UX Designer
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Maze
Timeline
September 2023 - December 2023
Problem
The Organizational Struggles of Relocating
Relocating is often overwhelming, with countless tasks like finding housing, hiring movers, packing, and coordinating with others—all happening simultaneously. The lack of a centralized system makes it hard to stay organized and increases stress during an already hectic time.
Solution
Simplifying Relocation with AI: A Smarter Moving Checklist
Move Guru streamlines the relocation process by using AI to generate tailored moving checklists based on each user’s unique needs and timeline. It centralizes tasks, improves collaboration among those involved, and reduces stress so users can focus on the excitement of their move.
Create an Account with Move Guru
Build Your Moving Plan
Competitive Analysis
Revealing Opportunities to Improve the Moving Experience
A SWOT analysis of three relevant tools—MoveAdvisor, Sortly, and Apple Notes—revealed key gaps and opportunities in the moving support space. While these tools offer useful features like mover comparison, inventory management, and ease of use, they fall short in areas such as user overwhelm, limited integrations, and lack of advanced task-tracking capabilities. These insights highlighted the need for a more centralized, user-friendly solution that combines smart task management with personalized support—setting the foundation for Move Guru.
User Interviews
The Real Challenges of Relocating, According to Movers
To better understand movers’ needs, I interviewed participants aged 27–31 who had recently relocated, both in-state and out-of-state. The goal was to uncover common struggles around staying organized during a move. Insights from these interviews were synthesized using affinity mapping to identify key pain points and patterns.
Difficulty Finding a Starting Point
Users noted that figuring out where to start in the moving process is the hardest part. It becomes slightly easier to plan from there.
Organization is Key for a Successful Move
With so many tasks, small and large, to complete, users stressed how important organization was to make their move successful.
Moving is Exciting Despite the Stress
Users talked through the emotions felt during the move. Though it is a stressful time, movers emphasized that it is also an exciting time.
User Personas
Two Personas Reflecting Different Moving Scenarios to Shape Design Direction
Two user personas were created to represent the pain points of my participants. The needs and frustrations of a young professional relocating to an apartment differed from a user that is moving into their first purchased home. These personas were then used to come up with a point of view statement and how might we to drive idea generation for a solution.
Movers are feeling overwhelmed by the number of tasks they need to complete and need clear guidance on where to start with resources for each step, but are short on time and struggle with motivation.
New homeowners are focused on purchasing essential items and affordable furniture and need solutions for transporting them, but feel overwhelmed by the volume of tasks and struggle to know where to start or how to pace themselves.
Ideation and Prioritization
Brainstorming and Feature Planning for MVP Development
Using my HMW statement as a guide, I brainstormed solutions using the time constraint and playing with opposites methods, then evaluated each idea for feasibility, uniqueness, and how well it addressed the problem. The chosen solution involved users inputting their tasks, with an algorithm calculating priority and time estimates. From there, I used the MoSCoW method—balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints—to prioritize features for the MVP, as shown in the chart below.
Must Have
Account creation
Moving task selection
Moving task algorithm
Resource database
Should Have
Location services to find a mover
Timeline
Integrations
Share and collaborate
Customize moving task selection
Upload/import tasks
Could Have
Countdown timer
Will Not Have
Forum
Chat with a virtual assistant
Purchasing a subscription
User Flow: Build Your Moving Plan
Visualizing Key User Paths and Use Cases
Low-Fidelity
Translating Flows Into Low-Fidelity Sketches
Landing Page
Build My Moving Plan
Resources Landing Page
Login and Sign Up
Mid-Fidelity
Mid-Fi Design Changes Guided by Peer Feedback
After finalizing my sketches, I digitized the layouts into mid-fidelity wireframes and completed three iterations. I began with a few key screens to validate direction, then expanded the flows based on feedback from a group critique and my mentor. The third iteration refined UI components and addressed alignment and spacing issues, with some of those changes shown below. Due to time constraints, I did not take the resources landing page flow to higher fidelity.
Before
After
Before
After
Branding
Building the Brand’s Identity
Before increasing the fidelity of my mid-fi’s, I dedicated time to decide on my brand’s style. I went for a minimal style and looked to brands like Airbnb and Task Rabbit for inspiration. Below is the outcome of my style guide and component library.
Final Screens
Design Changes Based on Unmoderated Usability Testing with 5 Participants in Maze
Addition of a Lightbox Notifying User of Success Creating an Account
Some users were looking for feedback to confirm their account was successfully created.
Added a Variation of the Homepage for New Users Building Their First Moving Plan
After completing the account creation task, users were confused to be taken back to the logged out user home page. They expected to be logged in after just creating their account.
Added Body Copy on the Moving Plan Page to Alert Users of Accompanying Resource Links with Each Task
Some users did not attempt to open the accordion so it’s possible they were not aware there were resource links available in the accordion.
Learnings
Conclusion
This was my first-ever UX design project and I am proud of the first product I have designed! It was a great experience to go through an entire UX design process to understand the general process and problems that you could run into as a designer. It was also an opportunity to get a feel for what parts of the process I enjoyed more or less, and where I can improve in the future.
Key Insights
User interviews are a treasure trove of information. There is no better way to learn about pain points than from your users. It was really interesting hearing about each user’s own moving experience and then finding the patterns of frustration where I could design a product to improve user experience. If there were more time, I would have liked to interview more than 5 participants to gather more information.
Consider features that add to the product’s value. Prioritizing features was difficult as there were a lot of features I felt could bring a lot of value to the product and to users. It was a trade off to get an MVP up and running within time constraints. If there were more time, I would have loved to incorporate features like uploading a list of tasks and integrations with 3rd party systems to auto update tasks when completed.
Organize and version your work. I learned how quickly designs can get large due to the amount of iterations you can go through at each stage of the project and the importance of keeping your design files organized. In my future projects, my goal is to improve on naming my layers and keeping versions of my designs in Figma so I can see how they progress and change over time.
Lean on resources to upskill and learn advanced Figma features. Since this was my first time turning my high-fidelity screens into a prototype, it was a steeper learning curve, but the outcome was worth the time. I took the time to lean on online resources, like YouTube, to use advanced Figma prototyping features, such as variables and conditional statements, to increase the fidelity of my prototype.
