Role
End-to-end UX Designer
Timeline
September 2023 - December 2023
Introduction
Creating an Application to Help Movers Stay Organized
Move Guru is a project designed to leverage the power of AI to help relocating professionals generate the optimal moving task list. Moving to a new place tends to be a stressful time in a person’s life so Move Guru was designed to help make the process easier for movers so they can focus more on the excitement and less on the stress.
Research
Competitive Analysis
As a starting point to better understanding the problem at hand, I performed SWOT analysis on 3 competitors — MoveAdvisor, Sortly, and Apple’s Notes app. These competitors were chosen because they were helping movers or businesses keep track of tasks and belongings or inventory and tasks. I assessed what competitors were doing well and where there was opportunity that could inspire my product.
User Interviews
Once I understood the competitive market, my next step was to go to the source to learn more about mover’s experiences. I interviewed participants aged 27-31. Some had moved within the state, while others had relocated out of state; none were moving with family, and all were either renting an apartment or buying a home. The goal of conducting these user interviews was to understand what struggles movers encounter when trying to stay organized so that I can create a site that fills the gaps and meets the needs of movers. The end goal was to ensure their move is successful.
The objectives were the following:
Understand the biggest pain points of the moving process.
Determine whether an organizational tool would be beneficial to use during the moving process.
Understand what constitutes a less stressful, successful move.
Analyze
Synthesizing User Interviews
From user interviews, I performed affinity mapping to find patterns and themes in my participant’s experiences.
The main themes that powered my solution were:
Difficulty with finding a starting point
How users planned their move
The emotions felt when preparing for the move
"Figuring out where to start is the biggest problem. It gets easier from there."
"There's so many little things to do you don't even think about. Organization helped make my move successful."
"The move can feel daunting and stressful, but it is also exciting."
User Personas
Now having a better understanding of the target market’s pain points, I channeled my empathy to create these user personas. 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.
POV
I’d like to explore ways to help relocating young professionals determine where in their moving process they should begin and which task will require the most time because moving can be just as exciting as it is stressful, but the excitement tends to only be felt during and after the move.
How Might We
Help movers identify the optimal starting point and sequence of tasks for a more organized and efficient moving process?
Ideation and Prioritization
Putting On My Thinking Cap
Using my HMW as a guide, the time constraint and playing with opposites methods were used when brainstorming ideas. Ultimately, after evaluating whether the idea solves the problem at hand, feasibility, and uniqueness of each idea, the winning solution was: “User plugs in all the tasks they need to do and an algorithm calculates what to do first and how much time it will take”.
Feature Prioritization
Now that I knew which idea I was moving forward with, it was time to decide which features would be highest priority for MVP. I evaluated business and user goals and considered technical constraints in order to come to my decision. The MoSCoW method was used and visualized 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
Once the features for MVP were decided on, it was time to visualize the user flows and task flows users would encounter while using the product. I considered both the “happy path” and error states when mapping my user flow. This exercise combined with using task flows helped me to consider the use cases my users would encounter while interacting with my product.
Task Flow: Build Your Moving Plan
Design
Low-Fidelity
Once I had the main user and task flows defined, it was time to start sketching out some ideas for my screen layouts. I iterated twice on these sketches. The second iteration is shown below. The first iteration had fewer sketches where I explored layouts and received feedback from my mentor before choosing to sketch out each flow further.
Landing Page
Build My Moving Plan
Resources Landing Page
Login and Sign Up
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
After I was happy with the layout ideas I had from my sketches, I moved on to digitizing my wireframes and designing mid-fidelity screens. Due to time constraints, I did not take the resources landing page flow to a higher fidelity. I completed three iterations of my mid-fidelity and in the first iteration I designed only a few initial screens — a logged in and logged out user home page, and an account sign up screen — to ensure I was on the right track before continuing. I built out these flows further in my second iteration where I received valuable feedback in a group critique session and from my mentor. My third iteration incorporated the feedback where I changed some UI components; plus I fixed some alignment and spacing issues. Some changes to my mid-fidelity wireframes between my second and third iterations are depicted below.
Fixed Alignment and Spacing on the Homepage
The after version fixed alignment so text was consistent. Spacing was also adjusted to remain consistent between sections.
Before
After
Changed the Moving Task Selection Component to Use a Checkbox Instead of a Radio Button
Feedback showed that use of the radio button was unclear and users expected a checkbox when tasked with multi-select.
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.
Iterations
High-Fidelity
Next, it was time to apply the branding to my mid-fidelity screens and take them to a high-fidelity. I worked on two iterations of this deliverable. The second iteration required minor improvements regarding button shadows and confirming accessibility for color usage. The screens shown below are from the second iteration.
Home (Logged Out User)
Build Your Moving Plan
Personalized Moving Plan
Usability Testing
Once I had a functioning prototype, it was time to carry out usability testing.
My goals for usability testing were the following:
Determine design inconsistencies and usability problem areas
Establish baseline user performance and user-satisfaction levels of the user interface
From there, I followed my plan to host unmoderated testing through Maze with the 5 participants I recruited. The following task flows were tested:
Create an account
Build a moving plan
Complete all tasks in the moving plan
Changes Made Based on Usability Testing
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.
Create an Account with Move Guru
Build Your Moving Plan
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.
