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Overview:
In this condensed one-month project, we as a team of three designers collaborated with Press, a startup dry cleaning POS company, to design an intuitive solution for customers to track their orders.
Role:
Product Designer
Key Skills:
Competitive Analysis, User Research, User Personas, User Flows, How-Might-We Statements, Wireframing, Prototyping
Timeline:
November 2023 - December 2023
Week 1 - Secondary Research & Competitive Analysis
As three designers with no prior knowledge or experience with dry cleaning businesses, we used the first week of this project to familiarize ourselves with the industry through secondary research and competitive analysis. Our secondary research included various articles on the Internet that gave overviews and explanations of how dry cleaning works and research into existing dry cleaners in our areas to better understand the variety of services that are offered. As for the competitive analysis, we looked into a few different existing dry cleaning POS systems, such as CleanCloud and Cents, to gain a better idea of features that worked with customers and features that could be offered.
Week 2 - User Interviews
Now that we had a good foundation of dry cleaning knowledge, the next step was to see where we wanted to take the product. One route was to devise a solution to address the pain points of existing dry cleaning customers. The other route was to devise a solution to help dry cleaning businesses acquire new customers. We decided to use the second week to conduct user interviews of both existing dry cleaning customers and individuals who hadn’t used dry cleaning before to provide insights for us to use in deciding where we wanted to take the project.
For existing dry cleaning customers, we wanted to discover what their struggles were with the overall process and identify process improvements that could be made. For individuals who hadn’t used dry cleaning before, we wanted to find out what the disconnect was - why hadn’t dry cleaning been on their radar before and what could potentially convert them into dry cleaning customers. We devised a script for each type of interviewee in order to standardize our interviews. At the end of week two, we had interviewed a total of 13 people, of which 6 had used dry cleaning services before and 7 hadn’t. After mapping out key takeaways from our interviews, we developed two user personas to represent each of our interview populations.
Take a look at our script!
Our notes from the interviews
Persona 1: User of dry cleaning
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Lack of effective communication can cause friction for customers
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ex: when system is down, cleaners often fail to let customers know before they end up showing up anyways
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ex: customer generally provided with 1 pickup date, but sometimes there are some items that aren’t fully washed yet, so ends up having to pick up only some clothes then the rest at a later time
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Wishes that service was automated
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prefers not needing to speak to a person when dropping off or picking up
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Persona 2: Never used dry cleaning
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Lack of understanding of pricing and servicing structure, deters possible customers from even considering dry cleaning
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ex: most cleaners don’t fully advertise pricing and services provided
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Consider it an extra cost-- would rather just wash clothes at home
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Also noted that not super common to own a lot of dry cleaning required clothing
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Pricing structure is not upfront and easy to understand
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not sure what ‘market price’ is
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am i overpaying for this?
Using the pain points identified from our user personas, we devised 3 How Might We statements to keep in mind as we started ideating solutions.
How Might We provide dry cleaning customers with a more efficient experience?
How Might We increase transparency between dry cleaners and customers?
How Might We provide new dry cleaning customers information relevant to their specific needs?
Week 3 - User Flows & Low-Fidelity Designs
After discussing our findings with the client, we decided to focus on devising a solution for current dry cleaning customers. With our target audience in mind as well as notes as to what our client was looking for, we came up with user flows to guide us in creating a low-fidelity prototype.
As we working as a remote team, we decided to first each come up with our own version of a low-fidelity prototype, which was to be designed in a mobile web format. Once we had each completed our low-fidelity prototypes, we presented them to the client in order to determine which features from our designs should be incorporated in a final low-fidelity design.
Here are a few screens from each of our low-fidelity designs!
Week 4 - High-Fidelity Prototype
Using input from the client, we collaborated to put together a final low-fidelity design. Then using Press’ design system, we turned that into a high-fidelity prototype, which we then presented to the client to conclude our project.
Our high-fidelity screens:
Conclusion
Through this client project, I was able to employ my understanding of design thinking as part of a design team and turn an idea into a tangible product in just four weeks. This experience taught me the importance of balancing individual ideas with the vision of the client and showed me what could be accomplished through collaboration with other designers.
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