Background
New York apartment renters are paying the highest rent while struggling from the crowded space, bad traffic, dirty streets, and expensive moving services. Around one fourth of NYU students live off-campus in an apartment in NYC. Most lease are 12-month long in NYC, which means renters(including myself) move around a lot.
Problem
Short-term apartment renters in NYC are reluctant to buy expensive brand-new furniture and struggle to manage large furniture after the lease ends.
A solution for...
Buying and Selling Used Furniture in an efficient and timely manner
1. Search filter by pick-up date, price, furniture category, and pick-up location from the map.
2. A built-in chat box provides a easy way for buyer-seller communication.
3. Sell your used furniture by simply creating a post in the app with all the details listed
So... how did I get to the solution?
Day 1: Understand the Problem
A real struggle with furniture that not only myself, but many more NY apartment renters experience.
Based on my interview with 5 commuter students who live off-campus at a rented apartment in NYC, I found that they are reluctant to spend too much on buying furniture. This is because...
1. Renters commonly choose to move out after their short-term lease ends.
2. Large furniture items are hard to move around, especially in NYC, so renters would often try to sell them or just dump them on the curbside.
1. Renters commonly choose to move out after their short-term lease ends.
2. Large furniture items are hard to move around, especially in NYC, so renters would often try to sell them or just dump them on the curbside.
We need a platform that allows NYC apartment renters to buy and sell their furniture with low effort and high impact.
Day 2: Ideating potential solutions and ideas
To design for secondhand marketplace is to design for timeliness and efficiency.
The demand for selling and buying used products, especially furniture is highly affected by move-in and move-out date. Thus, the emphasis of this design is timeliness and efficiency in seller-buyer communication. Based on the journey maps of seller and buyer below, I try to identify user-pain points in each step and aim to solve them in my design.
Day 3: Deciding + Prototyping
Sketching for user-centered design flows and clean visualization.
I looked at many different Apps for selling stuff such as eBay(big-ticket items), Nextdoor(local sales), Poshmark(designer items), and OfferUp(buyer-centered) for UI inspirations. I learned from each App’s visualization and layout to ensure that my design is bothseller- and buyer-friendly and has an emphasis on timeliness and efficiency.
Based on the opportunities defined from user's journey maps, I further decided on what key features to include using the prioritization matrix, looking at user value vs development effort.
Sketches of possible sections of the app
Journey map of a buyer
Journey map of a seller
Day 4: User Testing
Round of testing with potential users and improvements on features specify user's need.
On the final day of the sprint, I had my friend Selina, who is also an NYU student and lives off-campus on a 12-month apartment lease test my high-fi prototype.
Final Screens
Created with Figma
Conclusion + Next steps:
- Listen to the users' problem and need! Since I'm one among my user group, it's easy to assume that everyone is experiencing the exact same frustration as me. After research and actually talking to many more users, I started to notice things and aspects I've never thought of before. This project made me learn to be open-minded, critical, and have empathy for users of all needs.
- Details matter, especially in UI design. In user testing, someone points out a minor correction regarding center alignment of two elements that really bothered her but I've never noticed. The realization that being very attentive to details is also an important quality of a good UX designer hit me with full force.
