Dormbox

Dormbox is a relatively new company focusing on providing storage and moving services for college students. Their point of difference is the unique partnerships with universities which grant them access to provide on-campus moving services.

Roles: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer, Project Manager

Team: Debbie Laezman, Leslie Lung, Jenny Jiang

Duration: 3 week sprint

Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Google Suite, Zoom, Miro, Trello, Slack, Pen and Pape

The Challenge

Self-storage is a $39 billion a year industry, and due to the current uncertainty, there has been a surge in demand by college students. Sparefoot, the world’s largest self-storage marketplace, has found a 1,200% jump year over year for reservations made by accounts with .edu email addresses during the first two weeks of March.

Dormbox came to us with customer complaints about the checkout process and that the majority of their orders are placed after interacting with the online chat system.

The Solution

Our team reorganized the website’s information to educate customers, and streamlined the reservation and checkout processes to make it more intuitive for users and eliminate points of difficulty.

The Process

RESEARCH & DISCOVER

We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing Dormbox website to identify key usability issues and independently verify the issue at hand. Most notably, when a user lands on the site, a large animation of boxes and poster tubes begins to load above the fold, eating up bandwidth usage.

Meet Anna & Norah

By summarizing the users’ insights and takeaways, we were able to define and create two distinct personas -- one representing a student, one representing a parent -- to keep in mind to ensure our design decisions would benefit both users.

While the overall process seemed simple and straightforward, we had to carefully map out the existing user flows to get an even better understanding of the two services that they currently provide, outpost and door to door.

IDEATE & DESIGN

Now that we knew what features we needed to include in order to satisfy Anna’s and Norah’s needs, we connected the features together within their new aspirational journey maps. This helped us highlight the upward trend we wanted Anna and Norah to feel as they go through the new flow. 

 We also took a look at the existing information architecture to see where the gaps were to cause current customer confusion. Through our interviews, we saw that users didn’t know what the details of the service was until deep into the reservation process. To solve this, we wanted to include more information on how the services work upfront and easily accessible through the main navigation.

Because we wanted to build a framework that allows for expansion and growth as Dormbox’s business changes and evolves with time, we settled on a singular user flow that satisfies both services and would aid learnability and efficiency. Now, users like Anna and Norah would be able to know from the start of their journey that the service they book is dependent on what school they select in the beginning.

For the Door to Door flow, we knew from the initial user interviews that a major pain point was not understanding that they were booking a space for a singular item. After we consulted with the clients to understand the reasoning behind that choice, we took a look back at the competitors’ websites. Ultimately, we realized that booking an overall space for your items was the route we should take.

With the flow confirmed by users, we knew there were some iterations needed to be made for our medium fidelity wireframes:

• More information on the homepage

• Reduce call to action buttons

• Users wanted the ability to edit options before checkout

• OUTPOST: location selection was lost below the fold

• DOOR TO DOOR: still confusion over booking a space or an item

We proceeded to build out our medium fidelity prototype and performed 3 tests with the first version. We refined the copy for each service to clarify the benefits of each, and performed an additional 5 tests with this second version.

• Users were still confused about what exact services were available at their school → removed the different services information from the homepage so now you only see it after the school is selected, and simplified “How it works” section

• Users wanted to compare pricing right away when served both service options → modified copy to include starting prices

• Users wanted an easier way to see their order summary → moved the order summary to the right hand side so users can see updates as they select new items

 Next Steps

• Add in additional features and services as the business grows

• Build out the shipping service as a permanent feature

• Gather testimonials from existing customers

• Revamp the movers backend interface with real-time updates

Reflection

• It is crucial to independently validate the client’s assumptions of what the customer pain points are throughout the site experience to make sure that we’re solving for the most dire need.

• Using data to support a major pivot point to the client. Through testing with the existing model, it became apparent that the choice of reserving a space for a singular item was the most confusing factor for customers no matter how many copy changes were made. In looking back at the competitive research, I noticed that multiple companies offered reservations for a whole “space” as their business model, so our team decided to pursue something similar. By bringing this knowledge back to the client, they were now able to look at a portion of their business through a new lens.