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As DevMountain UX design bootcamp students, we were tasked with creating a mobile app that facilitates the renting of personal household items to family, friends, and community members. Our focus was mainly on rental of tools related to home maintenance. We chose branding and design that could allow for expansion into more items such as outdoor equipment or anything else that someone might have laying around their home. Additionally, our research and design was focused on the lender experience.
Most people accumulate a lot of items that they infrequently use, such as tools for home maintenance. It can be difficult to keep track of who we lend these items to, which results in lost items. Many people could use a solution that allows them to make money and make use of their material accumulation.
The first step in our process was to learn about the users’ experiences in renting and borrowing things. Some general questions were:
We interviewed 7 people from different backgrounds. Our goal was to uncover their needs and pain points with lending and renting items.
We created a 20 question survey and shared it over social media and neighborhood groups. The questions were phrased to understand who our respondents were. It was important to understand what types of living situations they had, and their personal networks.
After collecting quantitative and qualitative data about our users, we took that information to define the goals, motivations, and frustrations of our target user.
And the last step in our definition process was to create a site map. Between the site map and user story map we had all we needed to begin designing.
During the ideation phase we got into working out the design of our app. This involved brainstorming designs by sketching out ideas. Each of our team members shared their sketches and we compared designs. We came to a consensus on the design direction and the features that made the most sense.
Iterating in "crazy eights"
Iterating upon component designs
After playing around with color palettes and fonts, we decided to design the app as a dark-mode theme. Keyko threw together a slick style guide in Adobe XD for reference as the project progressed.
The first step in the prototyping phase was to create wireframes for all the pages and features, and create a basic low-fidelity prototype for testing. Some of the feedback we received in initial user interviews was incorporated into the designs.
Main pages of the low-fidelity prototype
During initial interviews, several users complained that they often missed notifications. Many apps make them separate from messages. In response we kept messages and notifications in one place.
We were concerned that this might result in confusion. Later, user testing would validate the usability of this design.
For usability testing we used InVision to create a clickable prototype. We created a testing script that included six tasks. Eight users took part in the testing.
Task sheet
Once we completed our usability testing we transferred all of our results to a spreadsheet. This was a helpful way to compare our testing results, and propose solutions to the issues users faced.
