A furniture rental program for college shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond. Created in collaboration with 2 other designers, Mary Tannian and Isabelle Anderson.
CATEGORY
UI/UX, User Research
PROGRAMS
Figma
THE PROBLEM
How might we help students and parents with the planning process for college?
THE SOLUTION
Introduction on the College Rental Home Page
Choosing a Rental Plan
Choosing and Customizing a Bundle
RESEARCH
Through student and parent surveys, it was found that many found the move-in and furniture selection process to be stressful and tedious. The pain points noted by participants were:
- Finding affordable but high quality furnishings
- Moving in and assembling furniture
- What to do with furniture after moving out/graduating
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
The furniture rental industry has grown over the past decade significantly. We looked into two companies - Oliver and LiveFeather. Both offer furniture rental options including flexible plans and bundles for convenience, while also including free shipping and assembly.
However, many existing furniture rental services use brand new items that are often thrown away after usage, which creates waste.
USER PERSONAS
We created three user personas that would highlight different needs and paths…
- Planner Penny 📝
- Freshman living in dorms, likes to plan ahead
- Flying to get to college, cannot bring furniture
- Will need furniture for the academic year, but not summers
- Would be best suited for a dorm bundle and academic year plan
- Temporary Taylor ⏱️
- Senior who plans on spending their last semester studying abroad
- Needs temporary furnishings for only one semester
- Not concerned about aesthetics
- Would be best suited for a pre-determined bundle and semester plan
- Decorative Dakota 🖼
- Junior moving into an unfurnished home
- Living in housing all year round
- Unfamiliar with furnishing, does not want to do a lot of searching
- Would be best suited for a customizable bundle and calendar year plan
In addition, all personas required these features to be incentivized to rent:
- Included delivery/pickup and assembly
- Variety of choices for custom styles
- Flexible and affordable renting plans
PLANNING
Our design style was based off of the existing Bed Bath & Beyond styles, specifically their website. Their design is characterized by clean shapes, bold type, and signature dark blue.
The screens we mainly focused on were the bundle and rental plan selections.
We created 6 bundle types:
- 3 different room bundles for users living in unfurnished homes
- 3 essentials bundles for users living in pre-furnished homes to fill any furnishing gaps
We created 4 plans:
- One semester for co-ops or studying abroad
- One academic year for living on-campus
- One year for full-year leases
- Two years for long-term housing
At first, it was difficult to figure out an effective method to organize the bundle and plan choices. While looking at other furniture rental websites for inspiration, we found that many of their layouts were cluttered and hard to navigate.
We decided that for our options, the grid system layout worked more effectively, as all options were laid out on one page.
PROTOTYPE
