HomeGo: AR Based Mobile Shipping Quotation App

Introduction

HomeGo is an Augmented Reality app that allows people to scan their house hold items easily and quickly. What they get in return is a shipment quote to move the scanned items from one place to another which helps them in the decision making process.

My Role

As the sole UX/UI designer, I was responsible for end-to-end solution for the design. I worked with the client and project manager and my main tasks included.

1. Market Insight & Ideation
2. Building the Project Vision
3. Scope definition
4. User Interface & Experience

Deliverables

The project was divided in multiple phases and each phase had it’s own deliverable. I provided following deliverables.

• Interview Questions
• Competitive Analysis
• User Persona
• User Journey Map
• User Flow
• Low-to-high fidelity sketches
• Wireframes
• Pixel-Perfect mockups
• Prototype

Process

The first step of the design process involved user interviews to understand how users behave as well as the competitors. It’s important to get this information early on in the process, before having an idea or prototyping.

After the analysis, I began to ideate a solution by focusing on the journey map, user flow and wireframes to give me a way to iterate faster through ideas. After approving it with the client I started designing the interface and took feedback from the team to validate the final design.

Interview

Interview is a first step to start working on any product. It helps you understand who you users are and what their requirements are. For this project, I interviewed some of my former colleagues and friends who have either moved in the past or shipped some house hold items. The interviews were very informal and the questions were asked during the meetups. Some of the questions are mentioned below:

• Did you have to interact with someone?
• How did you measure the size of the items?
• How many companies did you ask for quotes?
• If you shipped anything, did you have to buy the packaging material?
• Would you like a solution where a program could help you get a quote?

Hypothesis

Based on the answers I got during the interviews, I found that all of the participants wanted a digital solution to the problem. Some of the points I got from participants are mentioned below.

• Lack of detailed description about the shipping quote.
• Have to request an in-house survey or tell them all the item details to get a quote.
• Websites have a form to get quote but don’t work or are difficult to fill.
• Online services didn’t even respond to the queries.
• Multiple prices were given by different companies.
• Higher quotes and different way of packing by every one.

Personas

A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. As a UX designer, building empathy with your target users is really important which helps you identify exactly what they need from the product you’re designing.

User Journey Map

A user journey map is a visualization of the process that a user goes through to accomplish a goal. This helps a UX designer to understand the problem by mapping every step and thought of a user by compiling all the actions and putting them together in a time line to visualize the bigger picture.

Wireframe

Based on the previous deliverables, I began creating paper based sketches and later on converted them to hi-fidelity wireframes. This step was done to create the basic structure of the application before moving on to the visual design.

The wireframing process was extensive and took multiple rounds. I created them in high fidelity to not waste any time during the interface design process.

User Interface

Creating the interface design is one of the most challenging steps in any product design and this project is also not an exception. I started off by creating the color pallet and constructed multiple elements of the app to get a sense of what the client is looking for.

Later I moved on to the full screen designs. The camera screens were the most challenging as I had to iterate multiple times to complete them. Below are some of the screens from the final UI design of the app.

Thanks

The project was fun to work on and I took my time to understand each and every part of it to the best of my knowledge. The client was very happy with the outcome.

A big thanks to the people who participated in the interviews and gave me feedback to improve the idea.

That’s all