YiRental is a renting platform that helps overseas Chinese find suitable housing options across the U.S. Major services including long-term rental, short-term rental, roommates matching.
I joined Shareblock, a blockchain-focused start-up dedicated to sharing economy, in late March and started a challenging yet rewarding journey as a UX designer.
Aside from working with other designers on the team to create a mobile app for our blockchain service, I also got the opportunity to work on a major product that we already have on the market: YiRental, a renting platform for oversea Chinese. Collaborating with other designers, developers, and stakeholders closely in an agile environment has been a very refreshing experience for me.
Since our team was still quite small, I needed to take on responsibilities for different tasks and be able to multi-task. Some of the major projects I have worked on so far (and still working on!) are:
Project 1: YiRental Website Redesign
Project 2: Short Term Rental Feature
Project 3: Market / User Research
and more!
View our current website here.
Before redesigning the website, I conducted 7 interviews with the current users to find out the pain points of current version. I also conducted an stakeholder interview with our executives to clarify the goals for the upcoming version.
Key takeaways from user interviews:
Key takeaways from the stakeholder interview:
Combing the results from both interviews, I made the following changes:
Old version
New version
In this project I have learned that there are many trade-offs between business goals and UX flows and designs. Because our app is still in its early stage, it is important for the company to find potential partners and investors. Thus, even though the statistics might not be something users will be interested in, it is something that will help the company grows.
Since I joined the team, YiRental the App was in the middle of developing version 2. Since then, we have had several major and minor iterations for both business goals and user experience/interface. While assisting other designers in the overall app design, I was also a lead designer on a new feature that was coming in the next major update: short-term rental.
Ever since its first launch, the focus of YiRental has always been on long-term rental/sublets targeting Chinese nationals across the U.S. A short-term rental feature was a major step-forward for the app.
Together with another designer, we started with analyzing how other apps with similar features presented their housing details as well as the user flow for setting up a house and placing a order. One thing that we had to constantly keep in mind was we were designing a bilingual app. When thinking of a certain layout and style, we need to consider how Chinese AND English would look on the page.
Our next step would be conducting user testings and iterate more based on the results we got.
This was another part of my job that got me really excited. I was fortunate enough to collaborate with our marketing team to conduct research regarding current market and the product.
Along with our CEO, we divided our research plan into three phases:
The major goals of the current research plan are:
For more details of each project and other exciting works I’ve done with this amazing team, contact me at yw775@cornell.edu!
Working in a start-up is nothing like anything I’ve experienced before. Due to the size of the team and the amount of works that need to be done, everybody is taking on responsibilities beyond their regular job title. Besides my regular works as a UX designer, I am also participated in designing interview protocols, conducting research, designing marketing materials (Whitepaper graphics, one-pager, conference poster, etc.) when it’s necessary. During the development process for both ShareBlock app and YiRental app, as a designer, I get to hear from developers about what is viable and what needs to be changed first-hand and provide design solutions based on their feedbacks. Iterations are done by both designers and developers. In such a fast pace environment, time management skills and being organized are utterly crucial.
Collaborating with people from business executives, development teams, fellow designers, to marketing team makes me realize that a good product is the result of a team, where everybody is contributing to the project and helping each other to be better. I enjoy this environment even though sometimes it could get a little bit intense. Yet, it is a very good learning experience because I get to challenge myself to learn more and do more so that I could contribute more.