As someone who has moved a lot, I have my preconceived notions about what makes moving difficult, but it was important to define what I needed to understand about moving in general. I outlined my research goals in my Research Plan and developed my methodology to find out accordingly. I determined what I wanted to learn about moving and the methodology necessary to discover this. In order to understand the first hand experience people had with moving and what they used to help I wanted to learn about research what currently existed. Secondary market led to a competitive analysis of 3 distinct apps that lend to the moving process.

Analyzing data helped develop insights into how thoughts, feelings, behaviors revealed needs, desires, wants. Based on the anecdotal data of desires and frustrations, I developed insights to users’ behavior when moving.

Prioritizing the User

A commonly cited pain point by participants is the struggle of losing items. It was never the biggest pain point, but it was always framed as a defeated inevitability, an unavoidable casualty when relocating. Hearing how participants found it difficult to prioritize having an organized packing system helped me understand a definable problem. Although I had sought to understand the largest pain points for people while moving, most common stressors varied across every participant, bound by situational factors. When considering the data, it would be difficult for me to create a solution that addressed their biggest unsolved problem. However, hearing the defeat and frustration people had towards losing their items and not knowing how to prevent it set something off for me.

Despite my initial goals in the primary research, the data suggested that addressing the problem of losing belongings would be an avenue that has overall a greater impact.

I had identified my problem.

I took a linear approach to the design process, which meant I took the time to better define the problem, understand who it affects and who benefits from solutions. When interviewing participants, I asked about the digital resources they used and sought to better understand their thoughts towards existing digital products on the market.

While I found that overall participants were not opposed to using apps to ease the moving process, resistance to use came from not wanting to spend the time setting up an app and adjusting to using it for such a short period of time.

Because the timeline for moving already contains many shifting parts, digital products become useless immediately after moving. Thus one of the biggest needs was a short learning curve and a quick, intuitive flow to achieve the goals. Hearing the thoughts and the needs of the participants helped me solidify the archetype of the person who benefits the most from a solution, the persona.

Based on their personality, their experience with moving and the things they had to juggle, I was able to better focus on the goals of this product. Creating a storyboard put their personality in a greater context and illustrated the narrative that I sought to address. This gave the perspective I needed to think outside the narrative for solutions.  I came across augmented reality early in the stages because of sentiments expressed about using apps to keep track of possessions.

It sucks when you can’t find your things, but it would be tedious to log everything yourself

New York Participant, age 26

There was an expressed need to have a virtual inventory, as demonstrated by primary accounts as well as existing competitors, but there were critical issues with the existing options that prevented widespread usership. Augmented reality had potential as a method that improved those aspects. If users could simply scan the contents of their boxes as they were packing, they’d be able to quickly make virtual models of individual items or even grouped items that made minimal disruption to the packing process, and also created an important reference for where their possessions were. Instead of having to take photos to upload, creating a more comprehensive model of belongings to immediately upload onto a virtual cloud would achieve a necessary inventory system with minimal mental load. This addressed the need to:

1. Quickly create a reference of their packed items while moving

2. Create a confirmatory model of possession organization – users can confirm where their items are instead of guessing due to elimination.

Product Goals: small considerations lead to big differences 

Being able to define the product goals and how achieving the goals would meet the needs of both the user and the company as well as the potential pain points to consider when developing the features to include.

Recognizing that there are contextual factors to include to make sure that its benefit was outweighing the burden of its use was crucial in order to design impactful features. 

Defined product goals guided the concrete features needed to achieve these goals. The feature matrix organized the minimum functionality needed in order to make the product viable. 

Wireframes

With all necessary elements established I was ready to start sketching solutions. Initial wire framing helped better establish flows and the visual organization. 

Visual Design

Branding and visual choices to emphasize product goals

High Fidelity Screens

Final screen designs

Once high fidelity screens were created I was able to develop a prototype to test usability 

Testing focused on how easily first time users could learn how to carry out tasks. For this I developed a usability testing guide. Testing questions were developed to see if users would understand intuitively how the product could be used to address their needs for creating a virtual inventory. Testing would also ask if there were other needs to be considered when organizing possessions.

Revisions

Feedback provided iterations that were easy to implement. Three changes were made in order to improve the experience for the user.

Next steps to evaluate significant improvement 

Because initial testing proved to indicate valid intuitive usability, the next steps would be to build out further “nice to have” features, including AR furniture staging and customizable packing timelines. More importantly,

Further steps would be to test the validity of this solution, developing the metrics to determine if use of this product facilitates a significant difference in the amount of possessions retained when people pack up their belongings and move.