Moveapp

Moveapp is a design project that sought to reimagine the way urban services are located.

Introduction

The vision for Moveapp was focused on creating an excellent user experience validated by user research for people who intended to contract for services like moving or installing furniture. It aims to do this by means of an app based marketplace of services.  

I proposed this concept because competitive analysis showed a market that was glut with single service providers.  A related issue was that there was very little by way of ensuring that these providers were legitimate business, with most lacking customer reviews or independent assessments.  Moveapp proposes a competitive, vetted marketplace and a means for direct business to customer contact that is directly relevant to these concerns.  To this end, the app's UI is centered around a workflow where users may directly connect with a contractor and personally schedule services at a prearranged time.  

Research

Initial research was informed by the following hypothesis:

Users formulate policies governing moving on specific decision criteria: understanding what those consist of within this context [moving] and what their relative weights [value associations] are, through interrogating users’ previous experiences with moving, will allow me to construct an app with a user experience that presents informed and relevant information about the choices and tasks involved.

Competitive Analysis

For this step, I examined three services that competed with the product on a platform or a feature basis.

1. Move advisor: app based moving services provider.  MA performs home inventories, finds movers in your local area, and provides automated cost estimates.  MA’s cool feature was a sort of virtual apartment/home where you could make AR scans of your stuff and place.  Useful, but of limited value unless they allowed you to simulate the layout of the place you were moving to.

2. Unpakt: This provider let you create move plans and generate quotes from movers against them.  You could also buy supplies from them directly.  Unpakt’s USP was a service warrant; they screened movers for quality and reliability and guaranteed, backed by their own customer warrant, the standard of services you would find through their site.

3. Moving waldo: this provider was similar to unpakt.  USP was providing a marketplace and concierge service that would aid with planning, supplies and costing.  They were web-only, unlike the others.

User Research

The first phase of user research involved trying to understand where people saw possibilities for value addition across the moving workflow.  Here were the key questions in my user research plan:

1. What role can an app play in facilitating a move?

2. What sort of financial model around moving would users be comfortable with?

3. What are some clear benefits an app platform that centralizes service points can deliver?

4. What distinguishes competition in this space?

Methodology involved user interviews; and the questions above instructed what I asked them. There was a supplemental, related survey I developed as well.  The next step was to perform an affinity mapping of responses from user interviews. 

All user interviews were in-person; I interviewed 5 different people ranging from 30-75.  All interviewees had had experience with moving and the use of apps as primary originators of service delivery.

Define

The affinity mapping exercise threw up the following themes:

• Most users are reliant on a combination of Google search and word of mouth to locate moving services. 

• Trust is paramount; nearly every stage of a transaction relies on it.

• User prize clarity in pricing structure, and look for specific competencies after these baselines have been established. 

• Pricing by tasks seems viable in a business model targeted at this domain.

• Tech tools like AR and inventory management add tangible value but are dependent on the customers' tech. related sophistication.

•  Locating new marketplaces and value channels for customers to access secondary goods (applicance rentals etc.) can be a strong selling point for the app.

Personas

I created several personas based on learnings from the affinity mapping exercise.  

It was useful to map out design and business goals at this time, as well as their intersection with constraints. 

So far, work on moveapp had focused on determining what the drivers of users' need in this space looked like; what user goals were when they picked up an application meant to facilitate moving, and what interactions had been implemented by previous makers of such apps.  Converting the data I'd collected so far into a product design that incorporated some or all of the elements of users' perspectives was the next challenge in this process. Performing a card sorting exercise was an attempt at solving that in a concrete way.  

The card sort exercise had made clear what the primary components and content categories of the app had needed to be.  So the next step was to create user and task flows that laid out precisely the workflow that the app was proposing to make available to its users.  For reasons of time, I chose to base the wireframing and prototyping exercise around 2 specific user flows, each associated with a user story. 

User and task flows

Moving on to interaction design, I then created user and task flows that were predicated on learnings from the user research and persona mapping exercises.

Creating user and task flows also allowed me to create a schematic that would guide wireframe design.

Design

I then created a few UI assets for this project.  Here are some iterations of the logo, in particular.

Similarly, the wireframes for the project went through multiple iterations.  All assets were created in Figma. 

Prototype

Test

The final phase of this project involved usability testing.  The product was, by now, based on a services marketplace, and giving user the flexibility to navigate or filter content through the metrics they preferred turned out to be key. Testing involved 5 participants.  Key metrics used in the test were (a) Learnability. (b) Error recovery and (c) Satisfaction.  Overall, users rated the app around 3.5/4 on aggregate.  Most users rated the model easy to use, and said that errors were either non-existent or easy to recover from, which was a satisfying finding. 

Summary

Moveapp came a long way! From a topic on moving, to actually understanding why moving was frustrating (the market is full of scammers and has low quality standards in TO), to concretizing a product that has the potential to address these shortcomings – the journey was interesting and creative and it taught me a lot about what developing a product centered around the user experience really involves.