FedeRent

FedeRent is a platform that lets you rent out your belongings to others nearby. It is an Australian startup that is focused on the sharing economy.

My main responsibilities were to design the user interface, branding and user experience of the website and apps.

The views in this case study are my own and do not represent FedeRent or any of their brands.

Role: Lead Product UX/UI Designer

Project: Website and app design

Year: 2018

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Overview.

The owner of FedeRent contacted me to work with him on a freelance basis on the new design of his business idea. He had a basic website design but it was visually outdated and not very user-friendly. Maziar needed a quality, modern looking product to grow the business, be taken seriously in the market and get people using FedeRent.

Tool Stack.

Process.

I met with the company director Maziar frequently during the project, each time I presented him with wireframes and sketches of what I had been working on. We would then talk about the suitability of what I had come up with and we looked at any ideas he also wanted to explore. Maziar had a clear vision of what the product needed to do so we already had a solid feature list that included:

Create a user profile
Login in via social, Facebook and Twitter
List an item to lend to people
Map search for items to borrow
Ability to chat between lenders and borrowers
Upload photos of items and enter details about it
ID upload and verification process

Research.

Maziar and I interviewed many potential users about what the FedeRent product should do. We found that people really liked the idea, that was a positive sign that this was going to be successful. People wanted a product that was going to be reliable and professional with good security in place to flag potential problem customers.

Some more of the feedback was:

We want a way to rate users similar to Uber drivers
I need to be able to make sure the person I am meeting is reliable
I need a guarantee that if the item I rent out is lost or broken I will get it fixed or replaced
I want to see receipts for all the things I have rented out
I want to see where items are located on a map

We examined the feedback and feature requests after each round of user interviews and testing we then prioritised this based on feasibilty, scope and budgets as we didnt have the luxury of endless pool of money to design and build everything the users wanted.

Project Management.

For the FedeRent project, we used Sketch and InVision to manage most things. We uploaded the wireframes and designs into InVision via the Craft plugin. Once it was in there we could comment and resolve issues. Use the inspect feature to hand over to the developers and make prototypes ready for usability testing.

Wireframes & Usability testing.

I sketched wireframes and user flows in sharpies and pencils on paper before moving onto simple digital versions made in Balsamiq mocks and Sketch. This was a great way to quickly create and discuss design ideas with the team. Once we had agreed on wireframe designs we created clickable prototypes in InVision and tested with our user base. We created scenarios and scripts for the people and tested the desktop, mobile and app versions of FedeRent. We iterated our designs based on the feedback and repeated the process until the designs were coming back with all positive results from the users.

Identity & Interface Design.

FedeRent still had no identity. After meeting and discussing what direction Maziar wanted to go with I started on designing a logo that needed to look modern and interesting. I researched many different tech company logos and made sure that what I was designing was different from them. I presented various options back to Maziar and after some refinement and tweaking we ended up with the logo you see today.

Once the logo was done I created the style guide. This contained our colours, icon styles, grid structure, simple illustrations and typography. This document was essential to maintain consistency across all the platforms. Maziar wanted something unique and we decided that illustrations could work well for the FedeRent product. I designed some illustrations to use on the website and apps in Adobe Illustrator.

Feedback.

FedeRent is now live in Australia and the team is working hard to grow the business and user base. I asked FedeRent to get back in touch with me when they require more design work and if they wanted to set up data analytics and a ux strategy plan. Maziar the director was very happy with the designs.

“Julio had a great sense of design and has done some amazing work for big companies. He brought all his knowledge and expertise into designing FedeRent and I couldn’t be any happier with my decision bringing him on board.”