Asteria Cleaners is the Uber of the laundry world - speedy, extremely convenient and cost-effective.

In 2016 Asteria Cleaners has been acquired by Zipjet.

London is one of the world’s most time-deprived metropolises where time is the most expensive asset. With having to fit in work, family and social events in your day,  who enjoys wasting time on mundane things like doing laundry? Laundry apps are nothing if convenient - your laundry and dry cleaning needs are just a tap away.

As a mobile-first dry cleaning and laundry service, Asteria Cleaners promises radically change the way you do laundry.  Android and iOS apps arrange pickups and drop-offs through your phone. Plus, it’s beautiful and intuitive to use.

the challenge

Changing the medium

In 2015 Asteria Cleaners managed all bookings through the website. With rapidly expanding client base and new dry cleaning on demand services emerging every day Asteria Cleaners had to find a way to gain competitive advantage. I joined the team with a massive task in hands -  to design iOS and Android apps.

SETTING GOALS

Click. Clean. Deliver.

The goal was clear - Asteria Cleaners app had to be simple and straightforward. We wanted to create a product which removes all the friction that comes with clothing care, as well as, a product that people will enjoy using. Tap, clean, deliver - no less, no more.

RESEARCH

It all starts here 

The concept of the app got us all very excited, however we knew that enthusiasm can dull our logic. Therefore, we started learning everything we can about market landscape and our users. 

 RESEARCH

Know your enemy

We conducted competitive research to understand better what’s already out there, what works, what doesn't and how Asteria Cleaners can develop the product that stands out in the crowd of competitors.

user RESEARCH

Guess less. Know your users

Rather than making assumptions about our customers, we wanted to learn from them. Asteria Cleaners already had a solid client base using their service which allowed us to analyse current customer behavioural patterns and aggregate stats about customer cohorts using GA, heat maps and session replays.

user RESEARCH

Wonder Twins 

We combined insights from quantitative research with qualitative user research. We conducted user interviews to understand 3 key points: drivers - what is bringing users to the website, barriers - why are they not doing what we expect them to do, hooks - what is that persuaded users to do what they actually did.

GENERATIvE RESEARCH

Words vs feelings

While user interviews are a great way understand users' motivations, often interviews lack flexibility and don't get to the core of human emotions. There’s always a gap between what we say and what we do—that’s just human nature. Therefore, we conducted a variety of hands-on exercises with users to bring out the deeper levels of human experience. Hands-on exercises enable conversations and bridge the gap between what we say and how we feel.

We used lists and sentence completion exercises to understand users' feelings around the mundane every day tasks,  document different schedules and how household chores fit into people's lives, as well as, to understand associations, desires, preferences, and values about mundane every day tasks. These exercises allowed conversations unfold naturally and gather rich information on users' motivations and expectations.

AnALYSE & INTERPRET INSIGHT

Connecting the dots

Getting a glimpse into the daily lives of our customers showed us they needs, their behaviour, where they struggle and the opportunities for designing a product that will solve their problems. We created user personas to summarise and communicate user research findings as well as develop focus for Asteria Cleaners' app.

user flows

The journey starts here

Together with Asteria Cleaners team we analysed user personas, their motivations, needs and goals. This gave us enough information to start visually illustrate user flow, break customer's experience down into individual interactions and understand how app could help users achieve their goals in the easiest possible way.

wireframing & prototyping

From static to interactive

The ultimate goal of wireframing was to create a prototype so we could get the feel of the functionality and navigation. We moved from static wireframes to interactive flows multiple times and tested concepts early to understand what could be done better or what features were completely unnecessary.

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