Peer-to-peer Shoe Rental Mobile App
Nice Shoes is a mobile app that enables users to reserve and rent shoes from their nearby peers.
UX Design, academic
8 weeks, Spring '22
Team Leader
Challenge
The app is an idea I came up with and pitched to my class. It was one of the ideas selected so I became a team leader, collaborating with my assigned team, to help bring this idea to life using the Goal-Directed Design (GDD) method. As a group, we were new to the GDD method and had all recently read Alan Cooper's book but had not put it into practice yet. That was the challenge of this group project.
Intro
Goal-Directed Design (GDD) is a design method and complete process for understanding users’ goals, needs, and motivations. It’s an approach founded by Alan Cooper and mentioned in his first book that came out in 1995, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design.
Process
Project Kickoff: Because this was a project for our Interaction Design 1 class, we did not have real clients so our Kickoff Meeting was completed as a team. We wrote down our assumptions on a kickoff meeting worksheet, went over the goals of the project, timeline and deadlines for all deliverables. We also brainstormed who we might recruit for user research interviews.
Research Phase: Our team reviewed literature pertaining to the product and domain. We compiled articles we found on the web related to the biz aspects and data of the shoe rental market so that we could understand what has prevented it from being successful thus far. We then conducted a competitive audit, doing a SWOT analysis on the following apps: Amazon Wardrobe, Teneez, Wardrobe, and Rent the Runway. We then did a Stakeholder interview exercise, thinking through product vision, budget and schedule, tech constraints, opportunities, business drivers, perceptions of users and any disconnect between perceptions and what was found in research. After that, we conducted six user interviews and conducted affinity mapping after each interview.
Modeling: Based on the research findings, we determined what the use context is and created our user personas.
Requirements: We then determined the user requirements, based on our research, the business requirements and the technical needs for the app to be successful and provide a positive user experience.
iteratively refining them based on user feedback. Afterward, we built a high-fidelity, interactive prototype to test the design.
Framework: We designed low-fidelity wireframes to visualize the layout and navigation based on key path and validation path scenarios.
Refinement: We conducted usability tests with a diverse group of users to validate the design and identify areas for improvement. We took this feedback into consideration as we translated our low-fidelity screens to a high-fidelity design.
Conclusion
What I Learned
Besides learning the GDD method, I learned that being a team lead is very challenging. The most challenging part was aligning the schedules of 5 very busy college students who also work full-time, delegating and managing tasks, scheduling user research interviews, and managing a team’s schedule plus your own just to name a few. Also, the words you use in your UI design are as important as the icons, images and other graphical elements. In other words, content design is a very important part of the UX experience and overall design of your app. You want to use words that make sense to most, if not all, of your users so as not to confuse them when using your app. Words help give context to the user.
Moving Forward
We only made small tweaks based on the few usability tests we ran. I wish we had time to do more usability testing for this project before deciding on which further design changes. Then continue to test and iterate. I also wish we had guidance on the biz aspects from industry experts in order to make more guided design decisions that would have the best impact on the user’s goals and needs.
We treated this app like a real-world project so we had to do our best designing certain parts of the app without guidance on how certain interactions, that tie into business aspects, would be handled such as: who is responsible for providing pickup lockers, the sanitization of shoes after each use, etc.
Last, I would love to ideate on better branding, a style guide and design system. We decided to keep the app name and design simple since we had a week to translate all of our low-fidelity screens into high-fidelity designs. We also designed these screens before knowing about what an 8-pt grid is, so there's so many opportunities for improving the UI.