I designed a DYI toolkit rental app.

This was a fun small project that best reflected my creativity and ability to generate UX/UI solutions that take into account the long-term strategy of attracting and retaining the users of the app.

My Role: UX/UI Designer

Timeline: 72 hours, October 2021

Brief

Homely is a smartphone app for people who need to do some simple Do It Yourself (DIY) tasks. Homely has a target customer base of amateurs: regular people who sometimes need to access tools for a specific, fairly straightforward DIY task, such as assembling a cabinet, putting up a shelf, or repotting a plant. For this customer base, buying the tools outright seems unnecessary. Renting the tools, on the other hand, is cheaper, less wasteful, and saves space in their home.

This project was created for Designflows 2021 competition. I was given a brief and had full freedom on creating anything in accordance to the brief requirements. I had to design the following materials for the Homely smartphone app: 

App Icon, sticking to the shape of icons used in the current version of iOS. 

Toolkit Rental screen. The only must-have is a search bar. 

My Rentals screen. This is where the user manages and tracks their past, present, and future bookings. 

How it Works screen. The user sees this before or after the payment screen

Part 1 - Understanding the User

Firstly, I took the time to better analyze the target audience of the app to take into account their needs and motives.

According to the brief, "Homely has a target customer base of amateurs: regular people who sometimes need to access tools for a specific, fairly straightforward DIY task, such as assembling a cabinet, putting up a shelf, or repotting a plant." (so, for example, me!)

For such an audience, I imagined the app being minimalistic and straightforward. According to the target audience description from the brief, people who would be using the app are:

• not very knowledgeable about which exact tools they would need for a certain project (otherwise they wouldn't be "amateurs")

• not really that much interested in DYI projects (otherwise they'd just buy their own DYI tools)

• probably only going to use it 1-2 times per year (since they're not that interested in DYI projects)

• probably going to see the DYI task as more of trouble rather than fun (since they don't enjoy DYI projects that much)

​​​​​​​I tried to emphasize with the potential users of the app and realized that their main pain points would be:

tools are expensive to buy;

• tools need space to be stored;

• lack of knowledge on which tools exactly they might need for which tasks;

• lack of understanding on how exactly to do a specific task;

• lack of interest towards DYI tasks;

• hiring specialized service providers is expensive.

Based on these pain points, I tried to solve 2 main problems with my design:

• How do we make sure that people who know nothing about DYI will still be able to rent the exact toolkit that they need for a specific task?

• How do we make DYI tasks more fun for the audience?

‍‍However, since I had so much space for creativity in this project, I decided to look deeper into the business perspective and ask ann additional question: How do we make the people use the app more frequently?

Solutions

Here is how I addressed the above-mentioned questions through the features in my design:

1. Users can choose toolkits not only based on the tools they contain, but on the very specific task that the user needs to accomplish, say "Paint a wall" toolkit instead of "Rent a Roller" option or a generic "Home Renovation" toolkit (wouldn't want the users to deal with more tools than they need when they don't know what's meant for what, right?).

2. Users can create a memoji for the user profile picture that will then be reflected on the images within the app. This addresses many goals, such as:

• Personalized experience and emotional connection with the app, which helps to make the app more user-friendly and raise user loyalty;

• No need to upload the real photo, which some users might find intrusive;

• Higher user retention due to the fact that the users need to put some effort into creating the memoji when they create the account = they feel like they've already contributed something to the app = they will be less willing to delete it;

• A fun and memorable experience which might help users remember about the app.

3. Add the feature of connecting with friends in the app to:

• Be able to rent tools together, in order to be able to share expenses or turn the DIY projects into a fun get-together experience,

• Gamify the experience through completing DYI challenges,

• Add the socialization aspect to the app (proven to be one of the main features that lead to the more frequent use of products).

4. Use bright colors for the app to be associated with positivity and fun.

Now it was the time to start translating all these UX ideas into the visual design of the app.

Part 2 - Designing the UI

Firstly, I took the time to better analyze the target audience of the app to take into account their needs and motives.

According to the brief, "Homely has a target customer base of amateurs: regular people who sometimes need to access tools for a specific, fairly straightforward DIY task, such as assembling a cabinet, putting up a shelf, or repotting a plant." (so, for example, me!)

For such an audience, I imagined the app being minimalistic and straightforward. According to the target audience description from the brief, people who would be using the app are:

• not very knowledgeable about which exact tools they would need for a certain project (otherwise they wouldn't be "amateurs")

• not really that much interested in DIY projects (otherwise they'd just buy their own DYI tools)

• probably only going to use it 1-2 times per year (since they're not that interested in DIY projects)

• probably going to see the DIY task as more of trouble rather than fun (since they don't enjoy DIY projects that much)

Finally, the screens were ready to go! 🥳

Part 3 - Icon

The icon was one of the biggest challenges of the project, as I only had a couple of hours left until I had to submit my work! I remember vividly going for an evening walk and hoping that I’ll get a good idea during that walk. And I guess I did — because I personally love how it turned out!

The combination of the shapes of a house and a tool — what could represent “Homely, that app with toolkits” better.

I’ll let you in on a secret — this icon is still one of my favorite pieces of design that I’ve created :)

Final Solution

Retrospective

I had a lot of fun working on this project! It was a great opportunity to flex my creativity without many constraints, unlike my other more corporate projects. That's why I decided to include it in my portfolio, even though it's not my most technically-perfect work.

Although the task was mostly about designing the user interface, I made sure to do some UX analysis and ideation at the start, not just focusing on making it look pretty. If I had more time, I would have done proper research and come up with different concepts to test. I also enjoyed working on ideas to keep users interested in the app over the long term, as it was a rental app.

There are some things that could be improved though. If someone were to actually build this, it would need a lot of designer attention to make it scalable, since there are lots of elements that don't align within the container, and the text on the cards needs to be checked for accessibility. It would need to be redesigned or organized into a system to control these issues. But since this wasn't a real project, I don't feel too bad about having some fun with it :)