VacanBox
Designing for trust and security
Finding trustworthy storage next door.
VacanBox is a peer-to-peer storage rental marketplace. This start-up, headquartered in Houston, TX, provides a platform that enables hosts and renters to connect to meet their storage requirements. The company is in the beta testing phase and aims to acquire 25-50 hosts before launching its platform.
The host onboarding process has been launched, and our design team has been assigned to create the onboarding and account adoption for renters. However, since the company is in its initial stages, our team began with the research phase to gain all the necessary information to help build the platform.
Our primary objective is to instill trust and security in the platform, encourage hosts to add their listings and make renting a space easier.
Role: UI/UX Designer, Client Lead, and Presentation Lead
Timeline: 3-week team sprint (Karen Gomez & Anna Lam)
Tools: Miro & Figma
My Contributions: As part of a team of three, I took on the primary responsibility of acting as the client lead while working on this sprint. This involved conducting all communications with the client and leading meetings. During these meetings, I presented updates on the team's progress, discoveries, and next steps while addressing client questions or concerns.
Ensuring trust and security while building a reputation
Given that VacanBox has yet to launch, we conducted extensive preliminary research to better understand the P2P space, its competitors, VacanBox’s current platform and business model, etc.
We studied the peer-to-peer market and its definition of success while keeping VacanBox's goals in mind. We aimed to stand out and enter the sustainability storage space.
“Millennials and their Gen Z brethren are interested in authenticity, not salesmanship. They have diminished brand trust compared to past generations, and they want insights from people whose lives are like theirs - not from people who have additional privileges...P2P marketing is effective because people trust recommendations from those closest to them.”
—https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/334472
How are our competitors addressing trust and security?
We observed that users primarily seek emotional connections, flexibility, and philanthropy/partnerships that emphasize trust and community when using similar storage sites.
Through competitive and comparative research, we found that evoking trust and authenticity through community is the best approach.
Validating gaps through our research.
First, we evaluated the platform's usability, including host onboarding, language, buttons/dropdowns, navigation, and error prevention, to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Then, we validated gaps in the market by mapping out VacanBox's key activities, resources, value propositions, customer relationships, and channels. This helped validate gaps in the market and identify aspects to consider while designing the business model.
We developed a HEART framework to measure success in happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and tasks by mapping the sentiments behind user actions.
Lastly, we audited Vacanbox's competitors (Neighbor, Stache, and Peer Storage) to gain insights into our design strategy and identify areas of opportunity for primary site tasks.
What about our users?
Our research revealed millennials, homeowners and students to lead in the market for a potential customer base. We conducted 10 user interviews on these specific demographics.
“I want to feel like I can trust a site by looking at it, and I need to know my stuff is secure.””
of users found security to be important
88%
75%
of users care about convenience
100%
of users want a sense of trust while using a service
Unboxing our user’s feelings.
Our interviews led us to create an Affinity Map that showed our users prioritize price, proximity, safety, flexibility, and easy-to-understand policies. We also noticed that these areas of importance lack emotional attachment.
To gain further insights, we used an empathy map to visualize the needs and behaviors of our potential users. Our findings from the empathy map were parallel to the insights we gained from our interviews, indicating that trust and flexibility are crucial for our users.
Meet your next Vacanbox Hosts.
Our research uncovered a primary and secondary host persona, each seeking to earn money through side hustles or entrepreneurial endeavors.
Primary Host
Secondary Host
Meet your Renters.
Our renters had different needs. The primary renter focused more on affordability and flexibility and was willing to compromise on safety features. On the other hand, the secondary renter also valued flexibility but was more interested in security and additional features.
Primary Renter
Secondary Renter
Self storage has traditionally been viewed as a temporary solution, so users have not raised concerns about the absence of flexibility or brand identity. Our research has helped us identify the design challenge of redesigning the VacanBox platform in a way that inspires confidence and safety while also offering brand differentiation through the embodiment of flexibility and trust.
Opportunity Statement
The process of self-storage is currently unemotional and rigid. This means storage is seen as a stopgap, therefore never questioning flexibility or brand. However, there are existing platforms which have not yet fully penetrated the market, and users describe them as concerning and potentially unsafe. There's an opportunity to redesign this platform to evoke safety while also providing brand differentiation, such as flexibility and environmental practices.
Solution Statement
Our goal is to design a platform that evokes safety, trust and engagement for users. A focus on transparency and a seamless platform experience in addition to flexibility and partnerships for both hosts and renters is able to evoke emotion and create a differentiation between VacanBox and competitors in order to uniquely penetrate the market.
Keeping trust and authenticity as our top design priority.
Sketch sessions with the team to quickly draw ideas
Wireframes to set the framework
Lo-fidelity to present to the client before proceeding to Hi-fidelity
Developing authenticity through thoughtful style decisions.
We created clear and concise design documentation with the help of a style guide. We extended our research by using two original brand colors. Based on our findings, we established standards for typography, a complete color palette, sample photographs, a set of icons, and UI elements to ensure compatibility with brand identification, trust, and security.
Usability Test 1:
What we learned from our users:
87.5%
<30
<5
88%
of participants described the VacanBox site as “simple” and/or “straightforward.”
Users could onboard with less than 30 clicks, for renting or becoming a host. This outperformed our competitor.
Users navigated through both flows with less than five (5) mis-clicks per task after our first phase of iterations.
The design received an Excellent rating with a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 88, equivalent to an A grade.
Usability Test 2:
The importance of copy & button language
In our second round of testing, we learned how critical language played in our user’s experience and how having the option for added features portrayed flexibility and trust, even though most users opted out of using the added features.
Additionally, we identified partnerships as a priority throughout the site—enabling users to determine the VacanBox platform with a familiar, trustworthy brand and brand-enhanced adoption.
Testing the high-fidelity prototype
Using a different set of colors to create a new emotional response.
We created a new set of colors to elicit specific user emotions and align with VacanBox’s mission to expand into sustainable storage. We carefully considered the feelings we wanted to evoke and incorporated them into our alternative color palette.
Users found the green palette to be calming, trustworthy, and inviting—feelings aligned with VacanBox’s sustainability mission.
Final Thoughts.
Additional participants are needed to conduct further A/B testing and investigate what color palette is appropriate for VacanBox's future mission.
Continue testing for “security” when making a reservation and diving deeper into how many partner organizations (e.g., PayPal, Apple, Google, etc.) VacanBox will need users to trust it immediately and proceed with payment.