I worked as the only Designer in a group of 8 including 6 Web Designers and 1 Product Manager. My responsibilities included
Logistics, SaaS
Making it easier for employed professionals to relocate within the US without stress.
I don’t think anyone likes to relocate because of the amount of work that is involved in the process. It can be annoying, frustrating and in some cases, leave you sick or worse on a hospital bed. Asides moving, there are other related activities that are included in the process that can make you change your mind from relocating. Yes, it is common to get your friends to help you move, or if you have the budget, get a moving company, but even at that you still feel like something is off or your favorite flower vase was stolen in the process. Peace of Home as a company seeks to help you with relocation and its related activities like car transportation, pet relocation, house painting amongst many others and the good thing is, they do it so you can focus on yourself while you move whether it is from the West Coast to New York or within Atlanta.
The first bit of information I received was on the discovery call my team had with the product owner where we understood what the project was all about and we had all our questions answered. On the same call, we scoped an initial project plan with the product owner and agreed on the first set of wireframe delivery.
I went on see what our competitors were doing to understand the industry a bit I carried out a competitive analysis of what other moving companies were doing and how they approached solving the problem of relocating. Visiting several websites, I noted down major differences between their approach to relocating trying to understand why and how they go about it.
Despite the high number of moving companies, there were still gaps that needed to be filled and that is where PoH (Peace of Home) would thrive. After understanding the competition and how they were solving the problem of relocation, I went forward to find out how our proposed target audience were doing with the solution that existed in the number of numerous moving companies and this further showed the gaps that we planned to fill.
After everything I learnt from the above information and the product owner’s idea, I moved forward to clearly defining who our users might be.
Peace of Home's idea was not just to help professionals move across the United States but also to help companies reduce the burden their staff had when relocating across different office branches or relocating to new locations. We had majorly 4 users divided into 2 parts (The Professional’s Company and Peace of Home)
My team worked in an agile manner, running incremental sprints designing the appropriate screens according to the project plan given to the product owner initially and the developers in the same way building previously designed screens. We had daily standups to resolve issues and blockers as we had a limited time to build out the MVP of the project. Working this way also helped us move quickly across design and development and from time to time, the product owner joined standup to answer questions or provide feedback on any part of the project.
After more than 75% of the wireframes had been created, we had another meeting with the product owner to get feedback and after reviews, we moved into high fidelity designs.
After being invited by the HR, you as a staff can setup your profile and move forward to choosing the services you need. You also get to see the cost of the services, how much of your company’s moving budget you have exhausted and a payment page for you to augment the extras that are out of budget.
The coordinator on her dashboard gets to manage all the processes currently being processed and a chat to directly speak with the client (staff) moving.
The Peace of Home administrator gets to manage the entire platform with the ability to assign a coordinator to a moving process and managing existing or new coordinators
Looking back, this was my first attempt at designing for the logistics industry, and I learnt a lot of new things. Overall, no one is ever bigger than his/her team and collaboration is definitely important and I realized that more during this project. We started out as individual professionals but understood and worked better with good synergy at the end of the project.