One Repair | Ftzechingrachel

OneRepair

UX case study

OneRepair is based on a simple idea- to reduce the amount of e-waste generated by encouraging consumers to repair their faulty appliances instead of buying new.

Our goal was to educate consumers, and encourage them to connect with volunteers at social initiatives that teach DIY repair skills.

Project details

Roles

For this project, our team assumed the roles of

User Experience (UX) Designer
User Interface (UI) Designer
Visual designer
UX writer

Deliverables

UX/UI Design

One-on-one user interviews
User personas
Benchmarking and analysis
UI kit
Low-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity mockups and prototypes
Usability tests and findings

Project Specifications

Duration: 3 weeks

Tools:

Figma

Our assumptions

In order to reduce the amount of e-waste caused by throwaway culture, our team's brief was to create an app that matched consumers with volunteer run repair initiatives offering free repair services, and encouraging consumers to learn to repair their own appliances.

To validate these assumptions, our team conducted 18 user interviews and analyzed data from 33 surveys to find out more about the behaviours and attitudes towards small appliance repair in Singapore.

So who are our users?

We had two main user groups for this project, the volunteer repairers, and the consumers who were looking to repair their faulty appliances.

While the volunteer repairers are also taken into account, our main focus was on the consumers as OneRepair had a preexisting database of volunteers to tap on.

Sally

Sustainability advocate

Sally is mindful of the impact of e-waste, and makes the effort to learn to do minor repairs. She would like to repair more items but has no time and tools can be expensive. Repair need to be budget-friendly too.

Mike

Working professional

Mike will replace faulty appliances with new ones. He thinks it's not worth the effort and money to repair things, and gets frustrated if warranty is a administrative hassle, or if he needs to search for and wait on delivery of a part.

John

Retired hobbyist

John has the skills to repair his faulty appliances and does so often. He enjoys the challenge of fixing things, and his biggest concerns are that spare parts are hard to find.

Key findings

Insights from affinity mapping

Repair must be cost effective

People interviewed are price sensitive.

Majority of them would rather toss out a faulty item than trying to repair it because it is cheaper and more convenient to buy a replacement.

Despite this, most people don’t mind the idea of repairing their faulty appliances if only it were not a costly investment in time, energy, and money.

Lack of knowledge and time

Most people are unfamiliar with DIY repair and don't have the tools for it, while those who can do their own DIY repair have a hard time finding parts.

Time is a factor.

Consumers are not willing to spend more then an hour doing their own repairs, nor did they want to wait on volunteer availability. People wanted their faulty appliances to be fixed as soon as possible.

Sentimental or eco-friendly

Repair is an option if the item has sentimental value, or it's an expensive item that is expected to last longer.

Some people care about sustainability. They're mindful of the environment, feel a responsibility to recycle, and will invest in durable items even if it costs more.

Benchmarking

Who are the competitors?

We did a competitive analysis to understand where OneRepair stood. As a new brand, there was a lot of room to grow, but one advantage they had was the repair community's support. Actionable growth areas were to build a clear brand guideline and organized flow to connect users to a needed service.

Beyond direct competitors, we looked into companies outside the repair business to understand what are good user flows and common user interfaces.

Some key findings were a need for

Explanations on how the service works and what to expect
Clarity on which items can be repaired
Filtering and search functionality
Activities history and calendar
Option to message the service provider
Service provider history and resume available

Knowing this, we incorporated similar features into our proposed designs.

Pivot to prioritize user insights

At this point in our user research, our team had expanded our original goal of educating consumers and encouraging them to learn DIY repair skills. Consumers wanted a convenient way to contact reliable repairers who had the ability to quickly fix valuable items that were worth the hassle of repair. To address this need, we proposed an additional user flow to stakeholders from OneRepair.

Design studio with stakeholders

Our team conducted a 1 hour design studio with stakeholders from OneRepair to brainstorm on ways to motivate the user personas (Sally, Mike, and John) to tackle more small appliance repairs. We also took the opportunity to align on the app design and brand style.

Based on insights from user and competitive research, our goal was to build clear brand guidelines and organized flows to connect users to a needed repair service.

Branding and style guide

For the branding visuals and logo for OneRepair, we wanted to keep the app looking clean, with legible text, and a minimal, modern logo.

From user flow to prototypes

Usability testing

We tested the initial prototype with a scenario based on a user (Mike) who has a faulty appliance and wants to use the app to:

Search for tutorials for DIY repair
Engage with a repairer to book a repair job
Find a repair workshop to sign up
List a faulty item for other interested users for recycling

Usability testing

Glows and grows

The glows...

Users liked the new project button as it felt encouraging. User profile is easy to find and the links stand out

Users would use the app on a regular basis

"Recycle flow is good, feels like the Carousell app"

"...this is quite good, easy and fast, everything done in less than 30s"

The grows...

Users expect icons on the repairer’s profile page to be clickable.

Users found the UI for the tutorials page confusing, as they did not know how to proceed.

Users don’t want to see volunteer run repair initiatives when searching for repairers. They questioned why those events were there.

...and much more.

Our analysis

We received a ton of valuable feedback, and our users also came up with incredible ideas for new features that we thought could be implemented in the future.

However, our team had to prioritize what to address and we picked 3 main issues that the majority of our users mentioned, which would result in the greatest impact to the usability of the app.

Along the way we tackled a bunch of tiny details that needed TLC as well.