Recreogo​
Our client (Recreogo) and their development team have created a web application to facilitate the renting out of partners' recreational equipment to people during the partners’ typical off season or when the gear is otherwise idle.
Research
Cognitive walkthrough
Recreogo has two main user groups within their ecosystem: business partners that put their idle equipment inventory on the site to list and people seeking equipment to rent. In a perfect world, business users would be using Recreogo's site regularly to act as a cloud-based inventory manager. However, I need to create a design that hooks those business users in and convinces them this solution is right for them; ease of use and functionality are a couple of ways to do that.
​​The cognitive walkthrough showed me a few key pinpoints for all users. Sorting and searching, view availability of listings, and very unclear navigation. This cognitive walkthrough helped to bring questions and raise concerns for future research. I sought answers to questions such as, "How are you working around the obstacles in this system," and "What other systems are you using in tandem to this current inventory system?" in order to understand the needs and to offer solutions based in the prototypes.
Contextual Inquiry
I then used a contextual Inquiry to follow up with business owners to deepen my understanding of how the service is being used by them. I met with a company currently using Recreogo and learned that it was one of the few partners that found a workaround to Recreogo's limited sorting functionality (strategically labeling items with a numerical value in the product title allowed the company to have targeted items appear at the top of the list). I also learned that the business was using paper analogs to overcome shortcomings of the system. The contextual inquiry has focused my thoughts that I gleaned from the cognitive walkthrough.
Prototypes
Searching and Sorting
Searching and sorting functionality in the current system are basically non-existent. Adding this functionality to the inventory system is critical to giving businesses a reason to add their equipment and switch over from paper analogs. With this new search functionality, users can search by location, name, category, date available, and quantity available.
Information listing cards
Listings within the inventory have two states; card state and list state. Card state is an extremely effective way to portray what an Item looks like and gain high-level information by simply scanning. This is great for customers who are looking to rent but don't necessarily have a strict idea of what they want in mind and is great for business owners that want to have a quick, high level overview of what is in their current inventory, such as when finding an item for a walk-in or call-in customer.
The list state works well for showing more low-level data and higher quantities of it. This allows for easy, on the fly configuration that fits situational needs in a meaningful and flexible way. A use case for business users would be to find what item is not renting well or, conversely, which is being most demanded. For a customer, it is very helpful to view large numbers of listings if they have an Idea what they want but would like to know specific options related to the initially- desired product.
Reflection
Recreogo has a product that people and businesses want; taking into consideration the changes that have been proposed and implementing them will elevate Recreogo's product from good to great.