Easy Move App
Easy Move app aimed at streamlining the moving house process. Understanding that this was my first real experience after studying UX design, I threw myself into this experience to really learn as much as I could as well as implement the methods I'd learnt. I really wanted to help make the end product user friendly and have an optimum user experience.
01
Identifying the Problem, user research & creation of user persona
We've all moved house at some point in our life. This is an exciting time, but it can also be very stressful. We pack up our boxes and our idea is to create some sort of "method to our madness" by labelling or putting everything into some sort of order.
From my own experience of moving 4 times in 4 years, the boxes then get thrown into the van and mixed up. Then when we arrive, we end up searching through numerous boxes..forgetting where we put our favourite shoes! This is a problem and can be made much more organised. This was then discussed as the main idea or purpose of the app in our early chats between the developer, myself and the app investor.
Before drawing up any plans or concrete ideas, I needed a 'user need' baseline, something to work with. First I brainstormed a list of 'How may we's. These HMW's came from my personal experiences in using applications and from what I already noticed in reviews on the app store. I narrowed these down to 3 common baseline needs. These would be the initial structure for my research or chats with potential persona's:
01
How may we answer the user need and pain point
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How may we be something a user turns to
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How may we make sure the user understands the app
After considering these potential guidelines from my own experience and consideration of early ideas for the app, I moved on to user research of what problems are encountered when people move home and how we may be able to confront these issues in the app.
Research to identify problems
To begin my research, I decided to search the internet for common problems and issues that come up when people are moving house. This would also give me an insight into what's on people's mind when they're moving house and what they search for online.
I did a search of "common problems when moving house". These are some of the results I came across:
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Time Constraints; "If you’re in a rush to pack your belongings and have little time for the other necessary steps, you might have fallen into the trap of not having enough time to complete the transportation process. This usually ends badly due to hastiness and lack of concentration" (https://www.cycmovers.com/)
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Losing important documents and items; "Another aspect of moving which is often neglected is the security of important personal documents and items such as birth certificates, personal financial details, and passports. As these are essential to settling medical, legal and administrative issues in your life, you would do well to keep these safe. Unfortunately, sometimes things get muddled up in the whole moving process and these documents go missing." (https://www.cycmovers.com/)
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Insufficient time; "One problem that has the potential to ruin all your house moving plans is the realization that you won’t have enough time to finish the tasks that you’re required to complete before the day of the move." (https://www.themovingblog.com/)
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Overpacking; "packing and moving more stuff increases the moving price because the overall weight of the shipment goes up too" (https://www.themovingblog.com/)
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Packing in the last minute; "when packing frantically in the last minute, you will not be able to organize your items or ensure their safety. As a result, your belongings may get badly damaged during transportation" (https://moving.tips/bonus-tips-and-tricks/problems-when-moving-house/)
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Packing too many items; "You may also have a problem with insufficient space if the movers have misjudged the volume of your goods and sent a smaller vehicle or if you haven’t rented the right size of moving truck, etc. In such cases, you may be forced to leave some items behind, make several trips or use shuttle services – all options result in plenty of wasted time and money, not to mention the headaches." (https://moving.tips/bonus-tips-and-tricks/problems-when-moving-house/)
So, as we can see from the research, very similar issues came up across multiple sites and help resources. Time, space and organisation of personal items. These were the amongst the most common issues that people faced when moving home and something that the Easy Move application could focus on to appeal to potential users.
Current user journey
After reading and researching the user issues and problems in the moving process, putting together the data and research, a current user journey was put together. Here I could highlight potential pain points and areas that could be improved.
Pain Points
Pain points arrive half way through the current user journey. Based on research of common issues related to moving, generally users encounter problems when beginning to organise belongings to move. This then triggers time constraints which heightens stress and time related mistakes in packing.
User decides to move
User, due to lack of organisation, begins to feel the stress of the move
User researches and finds house
User begins to try and plan move
Time issue
User sorts belongings into specific boxes but encounters timing issues. Unable to find suitable app
User starts to organise personal belongings
Space issue
User on the last day throws in last items randomly in box. Encounters space issues
Stress
User moves into new house, however items are missing or damaged. User stressed
Interview findings
After initial research on general related issues encountered when moving, I conducted some research via interviews. I focused on asking users how they felt before they started a move, their experience while preparing to move and how they felt afterwards. Then, they were asked what were the main issues they encountered while moving and what they would look to do next time. Here are some responses I received (names are not real for data protection laws):
Olivia
Dan
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Noah
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Tess
- "I'm generally excited before
moving, but this quickly turns
to anxiety as the day gets
closer. I don't tend to use any
particular method to organise
my packing, I just pack as and
when I have time"
- "I never enjoy moving! Yeah,
it's great to look for a house, but moving always involves so much time and with working full time and my partner busy running a busy, miscommunication in the days leading up to moving is common"
- "After moving I always feel relief but also stressed. It takes me days just to find where I put everything and there's always something lost. I've lost count of how many things I've lost over the years!"
- "The thing that I always find is missing is some sort of organisation. Everything just gets thrown in bags and mixed up as the days pass and you just want to get it all done and finished"
As was discovered in initial research, the user interviews brought up the same issues. Excitement and anticipation dropped dramatically throughout the moving process. This lead to higher chances in miscommunication and disorder. This was mainly caused via time constraints and a lack of idea in how to proceed in packing and moving.
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Competitor analysis
Now that the focus on initial user research and focusing on user feelings was done, I moved onto looking into what was already on the market to see what could be emulated or improved. The competitors analysed were:
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Shyft Moving
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Moving Checklist
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Moving Boxes
The points I gathered from them I collected into a pros and cons and categorised them based on what we wanted to provide users using the current user flow and pain points.
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PRO: Moving boxes provided the user with the ability to "share" the move with a partner/family member. This could reduce miscommunication problems
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PRO: Moving boxes interface is simple and fresh
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PRO: Moving Checklist provides a simple checklist solution, allowing users to tick of jobs and items as they go along
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PRO: Shyft allows you to get in contact with a moving firm and talk face to face with them to discuss potential pricing etc
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CON: Moving boxes doesn't offer any easy and simple representation of box content or ability to add photos if needed
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CON: Shyft doesn't provide any way to organise a move, only delegate this to a moving firm
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CON: Shyft doesn't remove pain points such as organisation or time constraints involved in packing
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CON: Moving checklist is very basic and doesn't allow to add a capacity to a box, allowing a user to go over a box's capacity without realising
After combing this research, it allowed me to focus on what I wanted to take away and implement into the Easy Move application and what to avoid. We needed to include some sort of visual representation on a box's capacity, so the user could quickly view it without having to count a checklist. We needed to add an ability to quickly delete or add a box, without too many clicks. Also an ability for the user to add photos, so they could physically see what's in the box, without having to read too much. Time is always a constraint and a big contributor to the stress according to our user research and interviews, so the less time the user has to waste on reading or imputing data, the better the user's experience would be in using the app but also in moving, we could then focus on maintaining the user's good experience of moving through the user journey.
User Persona and Potential User Journey after Research
Now I needed to focus on creating a user persona based on my research and so I had something to focus my design decisions on, so that the design was always user focused. Putting together the research from my initial online research and user interviews I created the following Persona:
Joseph Perez
40 years old
Sales Rep
Has moved house before, but is finding as life gets more complicated and the time he has to dedicate to his family matters gets less and less, he finds moving house much more stressful than it was 15 years ago.
Uses technology but isn't really an expert. Uses mainly emailing, messaging and organisational apps on his smartphone. When at home with family, tends not to use his phone too often, only to maybe book a restaurant or to organise his week ahead.
Goals
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Wants to be able to move stress-free as he has before
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Wants to be able to coordinate with his partner to organise the move
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Doesn't want the move to take time away from his kids
After creating a user persona to keep in mind throughout the steps of the design process from now on, I wanted to put together a potential user journey, focusing how I could remove the pain points from the current/previous user journey when moving house:
Take away Points
After analysis and research I knew which areas of the app to focus on now. Allowing user to feel in control of the organisation of the boxes and their content, so when the user arrived to the new home they knew exactly where everything was. This took away the stress of the last day before the move, knowing how much space they had and allowed a much better time management with visual a representation of each box.
User decides to move
User researches and finds house
User begins to try and plan move
User organises boxes based on capacity and stress remains low
User discovers app in attempt to simplify the process and organisation
User starts to organise personal belongings
User arrives to the day of the move with boxes organised based on content and space
User arrives to new home and knows exactly where everything is. Stress much lower
Ideation, app architecture and user flows
After bringing together all of the research carried out so far and a potential user journey defined implementing the new features, I decided to define the features I would like to include in the application to answer the problems and pain points sufficiently.
Visual Aids
Time is crucial in moving house. Visual
aids can reduce time user needs to check details
Editable Boxes
Editable boxes will allow user flexibility on how big/small a box can be. Saves time and increases organisation
Simple UI
A user interface so user won't waste time understanding where and what they need to do
Add Photos
Ability to add photos to items inside boxes, so user has another visual aid to identify belongings quickly
I also decided to put together some potential user flows to demonstrate different paths a user could take, just to understand how the user experience could be optimised and something I could work with while creating the UI for the application. User flows were tested with 2 participants and results collected to optimise the flow before moving onto wireframes.
Things learnt after research phase
The research phase of this project was a real eye opener. It helped me to realise that maybe my initial idea's for the app would've have really resolved any problems or pain points that users would encounter when moving, and therefore the use of the app wouldn't have been there, affecting it's overall popularity and download potential.
Next time I want to try and expand my user interviews and usability testing as I feel this could have been much more in-depth and maybe could have brought further issues, mainly in usability testing and therefore an improved final user experience result.
02
Early drawings, wireframes and branding
Early drawing and sketches were focused around how the application should be simple, easy to use and integrating the findings from earlier research and ideation. However, we tend to overcomplicate the UI and fill the user with options and overload their cognitive decision making, when in reality they usually have only one purpose in mind when downloading an app. The purpose for this app would be "to organise my boxes, so I know what each box contains", as we found in the user interviews.
Some of examples of the drawings can be found in the picture gallery. Each page was considered how it could provide the user with exactly what he wanted to see or use, without too many options or too many clicks. The idea was to help the user find his box with just 2 or 3 clicks. We also wanted to allow the user to visualise the content of the box with a visual aid as considered in the ideation phase of the process, so the user didn't have to count or view each individual object. That way, they could easily understand how full a box was or if they could add extra items to a box. So they needed options to set capacity to a box.
After settling on a design and options to be included, I then put together some basic wireframes just to see how to app flow would be and how we could organise the buttons and options. I had these tested by 2 users, who ran through the flow to point out any flaws or things they would find strange, out of place or unnecessary. They were also tasked to achieve two goals: create a new move and edit the content of a box. After the results of these tests, I settled on a wireframe and proceeded to add the finer details to the design before the high-fidelity phase.
I focused the layout on allowing the user to ease through the application without much thought or in keeping with what they will already be used to in using a similar organisational app, making sure each option and choice was clear.
After deciding on a wireframe which maintained the above, I moved onto the High-Fidelity stage of the design.
3 options that were narrowed down for the home page
Final wireframe design for landing and creating a new 'move'
Final wireframe design for editing and viewing boxes in a created 'move'
3 options that were narrowed down for the home page
Branding and logo was also a part of my original responsibility. The colours that were considered were Yellow, Red and Teal Green. Yellow gave the idea of power, control and action. Which could have given the user a sense or measure of control over the situation of moving home, but could easily have stressed the user. Red giving a similar idea but also a sense of importance, as Red is a very common colour to see.
In the end we settled on Teal Green as our main objective was to settle the user and take away the stress of a move. Teal Green is soothing, calm and relaxing on the eyes. If the user needs to use this app repeatedly throughout a few days, maybe they will be staring at a screen regularly so having a colour that doesn't necessarily strain the eyes is important, as well as relaxing.
The logo I created was done with simplicity in mind. I didn't want it to dominate the app or take away from it's purpose. The logo combines an arrow pointing upwards in the shape of a house, the arrow signifying moving up and improving your life situation. The window I decided in the shape of a heart with the teal green colour, to signify love for the app and the user's new house.
A loading visual showing the app logo and a box opening with the heart inside
Landing screen displays the main logo before opening the home page
iOS app deck logo sample
A loading visual showing the app logo and a box opening with the heart inside
03
High-fidelity frames
In the high-fidelity mock-ups I looked to obviously maintain continuity through the app and maintain our original HMW's in mind, also including all of the research carried out through the process. After putting together some high-fidelity options, I provided these to some test users, who gave me some valuable feedback in terms of which version gave best results in terms of A/B testing and goal orientated results.
As mentioned previously, I wanted to add some visual aids to the application in viewing the contents of a box. This would allow the user to easy see how full the box was at a glance, rather than entering through each box and looking individually at it's contents.
I settled on a design with a coloured bar showing how full that box was, with the percentage in the middle. This would give the user an easy way to quickly check how many more items they could fit in.
View the gallery to see more examples of the final High fidelity frames.
The full layout and flow can be given upon request.
Final comments
This job was an eye-opener for me. Being one of my first real projects involving UI and UX work, I really wanted to apply all of my study to the whole process. I felt the research provided me with some good information in which way to go with the user flow and wireframing. I feel that maybe next time I could do a bit more usability testing which I mentioned earlier in this case study. This will surely give me a more rounded set of results to go off to be able to further increase and optimise the user experience.