Magpie Moving

End-to-end organization and packing aid website for busy young adults

Role// UX/UI Design

Year// 2023

Background

I started this project after witnessing the struggle felt in packing and unpacking amongst my peers. Through research, I discovered that majority of the younger generation does not have the extra cash flow to allow for the ease of a full service moving company. This pushed me to explore potential affordable alternatives to ease their organization induced stress.

Goals

Creating an end-to-end mobile website that aids the user in packing, unpacking, and keeping track of all of their items during or after a move to minimize stress.

Problem

Moving is expensive enough already, and many people do not have the extra budget to get help during the packing and unpacking process. It’s stressful as well to try and remember where everything is, to decide what to pack or unpack first, and manage your own regular life with out becoming overwhelmed.

Impact

For this project I confirmed the need for such a project through research and user testing to create this product as a solo designer.

Research

Before any sort of product can be made, it is essential that any future ideas are backed up by solid research. So, to begin the process, I dove into the business world of moving.

Goals

The points that I sought to clarify in my research:

  • Determine what people consider the most difficult aspect of moving

  • Understand why people end up moving, what is their motivation behind the choice

  • Understand each person’s packing and unpacking process

  • Learn what external resources each person uses during the process

Secondary Research

Two Men and a Truck

  • Full service moving company

  • Overall ease in moving

  • Expensive despite numerous options

  • Web based only, no app for tracking

  • Lots of competing local companies

Dolly

  • Connects you to local contractors to help with local moving tasks

  • Just the right amount of help that’s affordable

  • Only available in large US cities

  • Large number of use cases

  • Licensing issues could slow growth 

Uhaul

  • Self service rental company

  • Low staff requirements creates affordable product

  • Physical stress still on customer

  • Rise in competing rental businesses

Moving Boxes

  • App that creates box organization 

  • Great search is glitchy

  • UI and UX is fairly lacking

  • Completely free, good for budget conscious client

  • Paying to maintain app with no paid features

Findings

While there are a lot of different options on the market, most seemed to focus purely on the actual moving itself. While there are good options for more budget friendly services, there’s not much in the market that is aimed towards the actual packing and unpacking process.

Primary Research

To start I conducted five interviews over video calls with people from variety of backgrounds including:

  • Age 

  • Occupation

  • Economic status

  • Lifestyle

Methods

The methods that I would use to answer these questions:

  • Secondary research through analysis of competitive and pre-existing businesses in the same market

  • Primary research by way of in depths interviews and surveys across a larger audience

 From these, I found the following series of reoccurring issues:

  • Expensive to use full service

  • Large amount of stress

  • Lack of organization

  • Hate packing and unpacking

After this initial round of interviews I deduced that there seemed to be a hole in the market in terms of what young adults needed. The two I spoke with both emphasized the stress that budget friendly solutions still left them with. I wanted to dig a little deeper into this, so I sent out a survey to people within my new target audience of ages 25-35, from this I got 30 responses before I closed it for analysis.

Synopsis

Across everyone, one of the major things that stuck out to me was the nobody seemed to like packing, organizing, or unpacking. No matter what services they utilized, how many times they’d moved before, or what their economic status is, these processes lead to anxiety and stress for the majority. The person affected by this the most greatly, were busy young adults with out many other good options.

Define

The first step within the define process was to take all of my findings and boil them down into two essential statements: A ‘point of view’ statement and a ‘how might we’ statement.

POV Statement 

I’d like to explore ways to help busy young adults organize their whole moving experience from the first item being packed to the last item being unpacked because the disorganization leads to unnecessary stress. 

How Might We 

How might we prevent disorganization and stress with busy young adults during the moving process?

Next I needed to define my user a little bit better so that during my design process I had someone I could look at and ask myself, “Would this person use my product?“

User Personas

After compiling all of the information that I had gathered from my research, interviews, and survey I created two user personas to reference during my ideation to stay on track.

User Flows

Next on the docket was user flows, the task of mapping out all of the possibilities for different tasks a user might person on the website from start to finish.

Following this we have three different tasks mapped out, the key to which is included on the right.

User Flow 1: The Login Process

User Flow 2: Packing a Box

User Flow 3: Unpack a Box

Task Flows

After use flows comes task flows! These are meant to model the exact steps that a user will take in completing a task from start to finish, which in turn will help me in knowing what pages will need to be modeled.

Navigation

Meet Noah, the disorganized free spirit.

Noah is a young freelance artist with a wayward spirit. 

He moves often and doesn’t want to spend any unnecessary money or ask for help. 

He loses track of where he’s packed things in his car and needs help deciding what to bring with him and what to donate.

 Meet Amira, the overcommitted techie.

Amira has a demanding job with an intense schedule, and she has trouble keeping track of everything involved in her move. 

She needs help keeping track of events and dreads the process of unpacking her new place since the clutter makes her anxious. 

She’s willing to rent a truck for the move, but doesn’t have the money for a full service to take care of everything for her.

Task Flow 1: Logging in with a pre-existing email

Task Flow 2: Searching for a specific item

Now that I knew who I was designing for and what general problem I was trying to solve, it was time to think of some solutions.

Brainstorming

Through a playful use of constraints and time limits, I generated on as many ideas as I could before landing on one that spoke to me. And after some storyboarding and reflecting on my business and user goals, I decided to go with the following idea:

Creating an affordable AI/VR packing and unpacking tool.

This felt like a doable project given my time constraints, and tapped into an area that I saw being underrepresented in my primary and secondary research. 

Ideate

Now that know who I’m making this for and what it will be, it’s time to get into the details! What will this website consist of? What tasks will be performed?

Feature Set

Now that I had a direction, it was time to figure out what features my website would need to include, thus was born my feature set. My user research helped me to determine that I wanted to create something easy to use, pleasing to the eye, and helps to reduce the stress of moving. I then organized said features by value and effort to determine order of operations.

High Value

Account creation

Log in page

Packing feature

Unpack feature

System settings

Low Effort

Item scanning

AI assisted layout

Accessibility features

High Effort

Sticker maker

AI generated schedule

Company sponsorships

Low Value

Design

With the features decided it’s time to figure out what the website will look like. I went through the process of deciding the layouts, the colors, and designing all of the components.

Sketches

The first step in the process was rough sketches. I kept it very loose, generating as many ideas on paper as I could to see what different layouts might look like before getting too involved.

I ran my sketches past people within my target audience to get their opinions on which designs grabbed their attention.

One of the big factors I was deciding on was information density, how much information did I want on each page? The answer to which was “keep it simple.“

Lo-fi Wireframes

With the information I’d collected from my first round of sketches and reviews, it was time for the first round of digital designs with wireframes. I used the feed back from my peer reviews to guide my design choices and map out all of the screens I would need for my task flows. Through discussion with peers, at this point I ended up updating my three task flows: Creating an account, packing a box with the scan feature, and searching for a specific item.

UI Kit

Before diving into designing each page in detail, I went about laying ground rules for myself in terms of design. I reflected on my user, desiring simplicity and ease of use, and worked through how I wanted my elements from fonts to colors to look. One thing I kept in mind here was accessibility, I used a colorblindness tool to check my color schemes to make sure that what I was creating remained both aesthetically pleasing and easy to read with a variety of different vision issues. Using this tool, I ended up tweaking my elements until they became what you see here.

In addition, as I worked on my designs, I found that I was unable to find stock images to suit my needs. My solution there, was to create my own series of bird assets to help illustrate the steps that would need to be taken on each page.

Hi-Fi Prototype

With my elements and layouts through their first rounds of design, I used the prototype building software native to Figma to create a skeleton website able to complete my three tasks I built for: Creating an account, packing a box with the scan feature, and searching for a specific item.

Test

Now that I had a working prototype, it was time to make sure that the design made sense not only in my own head. It’s all well and good for it to look nice, but does it work? Better yet, is it something people would actually use?

User Testing

The objective of this usability testing is to evaluate ease of use for the product, identify hurdles and pain points, and allow us to make any necessary adjustments to improve user experience and satisfaction. The test will be run with five different users within the target audience to best assess current usability and quality. For my users, I created a series of three different tasks that I would ask my recruits to complete while I watched them either in person or remotely, and upon them, hopefully, completing each task I would ask them questions about their experiences

Methodology 

  • In person moderated usability testing 

  • Remote moderated usability testing

Tasks 

  • Account Creation 

  • Packing a Box 

  • Searching for a specific item

Success Metrics

  • Task Success 

  • Task Completion 

  • Time 

  • User Confidence 

  • Error Rate 

  • Task Difficulty 


Feedback

After all of my tests, I gathered together all of my notes and findings and sorted them on a chart based on the type of information, this way I could see what were common problems to be addressed.

Overall, my testers found my website easy to use, my use of birds were inviting, and they confirmed that this is a product they would use in real life.

I did, however, have some edits to be made. There were places where I’d made assumptions of knowledge, my users felt pieces of information should be on different pages, and even to add an additional search button option on my home page. All of my feedback was incredibly helpful and put to good use in my edits.

Conclusion

While working on this project I really learned how important peer review and testing were. The research and interview phase was already something I was familiar with, but historically the versions of critiques I am used to was from art school in having my final draft pinned to the wall to be judged. The change into a continuous editing process was challenging at first, but I found myself enjoying the process as time went on.

Next
Next

Blush