MoveIt
MoveIt
A customized moving checklist in three easy steps.
My Role
As the designer for MoveIt’s minimal viable product, I was responsible for the following:
Conducting and analyzing user interviews;
Design architecture including task flows, user flows, and sitemap;
Wireframing;
Branding and UI design system;
Usability testing;
Prototyping.
The Background
In short — moving is a stressful and strenuous activity. It’s physically demanding, time-consuming, and expensive.
However, there are so many problems, that in order to help people I needed to learn what part of the moving process is hardest so I could then create a service that reduces the difficulty.
RESEARCH
RESEARCH
The Moving Service Industry
The industry is saturated with three unique types of services. No service does it all for a user.
Why should a user have to choose one versus the other, or spend hours coordinating multiple services for one single move?
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Companies such as truck rentals and storage facilities, where the mover is expected to do the work
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Services typically offering a bundle of multiple services within the same area of expertise
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Services which are not centralized to moving, but beneficial to movers
Current User Experience
What are potential users frustrated with?
No clarity
Time-consuming
Limited learned knowledge
No easy way to compare
“I feel like there is a lack of, maybe just for our [millennial] generation, knowledge around moving. I feel like people in our age group, that just all flies right over their heads.”
User Research Participant
28 years old, upcoming move
“I think there’s not a lot of clarity in options. You have to go to each individual site and for a lot of them, the price isn’t clearly listed so that’s quite confusing.”
User Research Participant
29 years old, recently moved
The Research Outcome
There is no solution to streamline the moving process. Despite services that work to make this process easier, services only target one aspect of a move instead of making the overall process easier.
ANALYSIS
ANALYSIS
Meet the User
After speaking with potential users, there were two clear personas that presented themselves:
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Penny is ready to settle and she knows her next move will be long-term. Although she doesn’t have a ton of extra money for moving expenses, she has saved some and set a max budget to spend.
Penny stays busy with work, but that doesn’t stop her from doing what she enjoys. Penny makes time to see friends over the weekend, gets to the gym a few times a week, and even makes it to the occasional weeknight happy hour.
With so much to fit into her schedule already, Penny doesn’t know where to begin with her moving process, let alone how to fit research and planning into her day-to-day life. It would be easier if Penny had some guidance so she didn’t get so frustrated in the process.
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Cassie has lots of similarities to Penny — she is busy with work but committed to her social life, has limited free time, and also limited knowledge to prepare for her upcoming move. Cassie decided to move spur of the moment with some friends to a brand new city. She is excited about the change and wants to save as much money as possible for activities after her move. Cassie doesn’t have a moving budget but knows she can rely on friends and family to help for free, and self-service apps to sell all her furniture before moving.
As a “care-free” mover, there is little research to support Cassie would find value in a service to provide more structure and support to her move, so the focus moving forward is a solution for our user, Penny.
Penny’s Story
During her research one day, though, she finds a service offering a customized moving checklist – all she has to do is enter some details about her upcoming move.
Penny is stressed about her upcoming move. She is frustrated because moving isn’t a learned activity, and every time she does research she always seems stuck at square one.
Based on her moving details, Penny gets a personal checklist to guide her move. Penny can finally relax, and feel comfortable that she is ready for her big move!
How to Help Penny
The use of expected design patterns will allow for an easy and quick user flow.
Onboarding – build customer trust and sell the user on service
Sign-up – capture user data to be able to customize the service
Customized Checklist – provide a promised solution to make the user’s life easier
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Meets the need to capture relevant moving details in order for the service to work, and do it in a quick painless way that won’t churn potential customers
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With a task-based service, users need to be able to quickly digest a large amount of content and track their process along the way
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Users need to be able to make at-a-glance judgement calls during the fast pace moving process, which cards allow for with so much information
SOLUTION
SOLUTION
Starting with Sketches
Penny needs a design to use while on the go, so she can plan in her few free minutes throughout the day.
Penny needs a mobile-first design.
Meet the Brand
If MoveIt had a personality, it would be a high-energy, proactive, yet calming personality. The issues users face are a lack of clarity, overflowing information, and a stressful environment.
MoveIt is designed to counteract the users’ frustrations.
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To build the brand, I used a complimentary color palette to balance feuding emotions in a move.
I used a bold orange-red to highlight the energy needed behind a move. One of MoveIt’s brand values is proactive, and I wanted that to show through with a high-energy color that varied enough into the orange range not to be aggressive or angry.
The secondary color then tames down that energy to not trigger the stressful emotions of a move. To bring in the feeling more of a calming sense, I added blue.
Applying the Design
To test the color palette and keep consistent, I created a design system to implement in high-fidelity wireframes.
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With a wizard-based service, it is important to keep the flow consistent for the user, and a design system does just that. It also provides room for consistency in our growth, which is coming inevitably.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
THE FINAL PRODUCT
MoveIt
Once all the pieces were in place, the solution was ready – MoveIt: A custom checklist in three easy steps!
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With a brand-new service in a highly-saturated market, building trust with the user is extremely important.
User research proved many services were lacking information, so we made sure to address that user need as a top priority.
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Through group critiques and user testing, the design got progressively more user-friendly minimizing extra steps and streamlining the process — just like we are working to streamline the move!
As a mobile-first design, we moved to a multi-page wizard for better technical feasibility and to reduce confusion around CTA buttons.
The final design also focuses on only capturing key data relating to a move.
Before
After
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All users had one complaint in common — the lack of ease when it came to planning their move.
In order to meet that need, MoveIt incorporates an at-a-glance checklist that categorizes all tasks related to their move.
Based on user feedback and testing, tasks are broken into time categories.
Before
After
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
What could have changed?
The user’s (Penny) problem was always the focus of MoveIt, but Penny faces many problems. Looking back, A/B testing of storyboarding or low-fidelity sketches could have helped validate the best possible solution.
Additional moderated user testing can help determine what does or doesn’t work with the current MVP and will drive design decisions for future releases.
Option A
Option B
What’s next for MoveIt?
Research showed the best approach to moving is a structured plan, but that was hard to come by for users. Therefore, that is what we created — a structured checklist to build from.
However, we also know users are easily frustrated by the lack of clarity in moving services. We will explore how a checklist can flow into the next step of comparing moving services while still targeting MoveIt’s goal of reducing the time and stress spent moving.