SAVERY MOBILE APP

We talked to 15 people who have moved within the past 6 months or planned to move in the next 6 months. They are a combination of renters and owners. The purpose of the interviews was not to sell anything but to understand what are the problems they have and what are their goals. As the interviews went on, we kept modifying our canvas.

During the interview, we also took a look at their phones and tried to understand: What apps did movers install just for moving? What kinds of apps do movers keep on their phones? What kinds of apps they deleted or no longer use? What kinds of features are useful to movers? We tried to learn what ideas we can borrow from their current solutions.

We translating notes to an affinity map and patterns started to merge:
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‍"I always forget to use my coupons, they are useless if just sitting in my wallet or somewhere online."
"It's not straightforward to learn where I can use the coupon immediately!"

After grouping and analyzing notes, we tried to visualize user's current moving journey, and identified some of the gaps and breaks of the experience.

To address the breakdowns, we redesign the flow and adding a new component, a mobile saving app as an assistant, that helps the movers along the way of moving.

We did a lot of small tests to try validating our assumptions, one of which is the reminder. For the next a few days we found that people indeed left their email for reminder. We did several this kind of quick tests to validate our hypothesis of the features. "Fake it until you make it" is quite effective in this process.

We wanted to put our app in customers’ hands as soon as possible, and test some of the features before developing a native iOS or Android application. So we decided make a hybrid mobile app by using phoneGap (Codavor) framework. A hybrid application will compromise some performance but will require much shorter development cycle, and save time for us on learning user's feedback. A hybrid application is essentially some web content wrapped by native iOS or Android codes. The benefit of a hybrid application is that we can achieve continuous deployment by pushing new web designs without asking users to re-install the application again, and this is critical to achieving rapid iteration in the beginning.

After a few iterations, we curated a list of features that we have prioritized. We started to transform the hybrid prototype into a native application in order to leverage iOS's geofencing capability. In the meanwhile, more engineering resource was pulled in to form a team to carry this project on. The mobile app was called Savery and launched on App stores for continued learning.