Omni Rentals

Product Design Lead – 2019

Omni is a digital marketplace of rentable goods in select metropolitan cities; San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York. We believe in experiences over things, access over ownership, and Living Lighter rather than being weighed down by our possessions. We also believe in helping businesses with everything they need to manage, grow, and protect rentals.

Although my time with Omni was short, I had the privilege of creating and leading the design vision for Omni’s global design system, and designing a business facing (supply side) product from the ground up; Omni Lite Platform.

* Some UI in this prototype may slightly differ from final designs below

Omni Design System

 

My role: I created, maintained, and grew Omni’s global design system in order to maintain consistency between product design, engineering, branding, and marketing. I worked closely with the design team and front-end engineering team to align on global components and UX/UI patterns.

Typography & grid system

Typography is one of the foundational components of a solid design system as it needs to work harmoniously with other elements such as icons and UI controls. I created a set of typography CSS classes which included contrast-compliant colors, line-heights in 4px increments, and responsive sizing for mobile optimization. In the process, I also implemented a 4px increment grid system and created element spacing guidelines.

Color palette

I created a set of complimentary, modern colors to be use in our product’s UI, and assured that any colors being used for text were WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) contrast-compliant, even when placed on the lightest shades of their corresponding color sets. 

Global components

Using Sketch symbols libraries and Zeplin’s Styleguide feature, I created and maintained a universal set of reusable components that were shared between product & brand designers (Sketch symbols library), and the front-end engineering team (React components).

Responsive breakpoints

Worked closely with our data analyst to establish a responsive breakpoint system based on our user’s most commonly used screen resolutions.

Illustration library

Worked with an incredibly talented freelance illustrator (my daughter 😉) in creating an Omni brand illustration library.

Omni Lite Platform

 

My role: I led the end-to-end product design vision for our updated full-feature business-facing product, the Omni Lite Platform.

What is Omni Lite?

“Omni Lite” is the basic tier of our business facing product, the Omni Platform. The set of core features included with Omni Lite are fundamental in helping businesses with everything they need to manage, grow, and protect their rental equipment.

The problem we are trying to solve

We took all of our learnings from customers using our existing Platform product and prioritized a set of features to address existing pain points. From overdue returns to Stripe terminal payment transactions, we aimed to address user needs as well as close the gap between us and our competitor’s core features.

Inventory management

Add items

Omni Lite Platform users can add rentable as well as purchasable items to their inventory.

Manage your items

From your “Inventory” page you can add new items, edit, or delete existing items.

Order processing – Deep dive analysis

 

My role: I facilitated user interviews, shadowed users in the field, performed usability tests, and iterated on designs to maintain focus on usability.

Analysis & user research

Upon joining the Omni team I dove deep into our existing product experience, interviewing users, mapping out detailed user flow diagrams, and beginning to identifying pain points and areas of improvement. 

In an effort to gain a better understanding of store clerk’s check out and check in processes, I performed 3 in-depth interviews with current Omni Platform users. What did they like about the existing product? But more importantly, what was causing friction in their current workflows?

The interviews consisted of asking the clerks to walk me through their check out/in process step by step, click by click, in as much detail as possible. How do they scan the Orders page to find the order they’re looking for? How do they verify customer’s ID? How do they verify each item being rented out? Do they use additional software to manage their rentals? etc.

From these interviews I identified 5 key findings.

Key finding #1 – Orders are found using the renter’s name

When customers approach store clerks they always state their name when picking up rentals. Even PostMates delivery couriers will state the name of the renter when picking up orders.

1 – It’s important to make the name easily scannable and prominent as this is the data point used to find the order.

* Original Omni Platform designs

Key finding #2 – Many clicks required to verify orders

In order to prepare and validate orders, our Omni Platform users needed to switch between the Orders, Order Details, and Item Details pages to get all the information they need.

Orders page

1 – Verify the renter’s name

2 – Trigger the check out process

Order details page

3 – Verify the quantity of each item being rented

Item details page

4 – Verify each item’s SKU in order to find item’s location in the store

We discovered that an order with two items requires a minimum of 8 clicks to process.

Key finding #3 – Customers ask about pricing

Customers regularly ask about specific item and total order prices. We currently don’t show order pricing anywhere in the Platform. When customers would ask about pricing, the clerk would need to visit each item’s details page and add up the order total 1 item at a time.

1 – Instead of order pricing we’re showing the store’s portion of the profit-share transaction.

Key finding #4 – Orders are prepared before time of pick-up

The first thing store clerks do in the mornings is prepare that day’s orders ahead of time. That way the orders are ready to be handed off to the customers when they come in to pick up their items.

We currently support a limited number of status for our orders; New, Checked out, Returned, Overdue, and No-show. There’s an argument for adding an additional status to indicate when a “New” order has been prepared and is ready to be checked out. We could call this status “Ready” or “Staged” etc.

Finding #5 – No way to edit existing orders

Customers regularly ask to either remove items or add additional items to their orders. In order to remove an item, clerks must contact customer support to cancel the original order and create a new one. When asked to add items, customers are sometimes asked to place a separate order, or customer support would cancel and create a new order.

Updated Orders page designs

Addressing key findings from usability tests

The updated orders page and flow addressed all of the pain points discovered during the initial user study.

  1. The renter’s name is positioned prominently as the title for the order card, making names easier to scan.
  2. Expandable order cards contain all the information needed to prepare verify and prepare items. Reducing the number of clicks necessary to check out orders.
  3. All pricing information is available in the order card’s expanded view.
  4. Once an order has been prepared it can be marked as “Ready”.
  5. And clerks now have the ability to edit orders as well as create new orders themselves.

We were able to reduce the number of clicks required to process an order from 6+ to 3

Orders page – Additional features and design updates

  1. Omni brand presence
  2. The ability to switch between and manage multiple store accounts
  3. Search to narrow results
  4. Filter orders by status
  5. Create a new order
  6. Default “All” prioritized sort order (Flagged, Today, Tomorrow, Future, Past), paginated after 20 orders. MVP approach to calendar day and date-range sorting and filtering.

Create new orders

Prior to these Omni Lite updates, our clerks were unable to process walk-in orders. Orders could only be created and booked on our customer-facing marketplace or by our customer support team.

Add customers

New customers could now be created during the order creation process. Customers added to new orders were also added to our new CRM (customer relationship management) page.

Modify order dates

Just like on our Marketplace app, users can now modify order dates and view available items and live pricing information.

Add items

Clerks can now add rentable as well as purchasable items to customer orders. Item quantity can be adjusted and items can be added and removed on the “Create new order” page.

Enter promo codes

Store owners and clerks can create custom promotional codes and enter them during order creation. Omni specific promo codes can also be entered for an Omni specific discount.

Process orders

Check-out process

During check out, clerks can choose to allow the user to process and pay for the order on their own device. This allows customers to become verified Omni users. Verified users are covered up to $10,000 per item by Omni Shield protection. The clerk can also choose to process a credit card using Stripe. Omni Shield only covers unverified Stipe transactions up to $500 per item (as of now). Clerks can also process a credit card manually if a Stripe terminal is unavailable.

Edit orders

One major pain point for our existing Omni Platform users was the inability to edit or modify orders. Clerks needed to contact customer support in order to add or remove items, as well as change the quanity of items, which required an entirely new order to be created. Clerks can now:

  1. Cancel any edits made during the editing process
  2. Save any edits made to the order
  3. Modify dates
  4. Update the quantity of items
  5. Remove items
  6. Add additional items
  7. And cancel the order entirely

Add refund

If for whatever reason a customer is unsatisfied with their service or transaction, clerks have the freedom and control to add full or partial refunds.

Check in order

Standard order check-in is a simple 2 click process.

Overdue check in process

Orders are flagged as “Overdue” for a few reasons. 1) The order could in fact be overdue and the items were not returned on time. 2) The clerk could have just forgotten to check the order in, and it is in fact not overdue. 3) Or the order is long overdue and assumed to be stolen. Our new overdue check in process allows our clerks to add late fees, retroactively correct check-in times, and file claims on stolen items.

No-show order processing

Orders are flagged as a “No-show” for a couple reasons. 1) The order was truely never picked up. 2) Or they were picked up and have been returned either on time, late, or never returned and presumed stolen. Our new no-show check in process allows our clerks to add no-show fees, retroactively correct check-out times, add late fees, and file claims on stolen items.

Earnings reports and store settings

Earnings

Users have two options when it comes to payouts. You can either attach a bank account or you can connect an XRP wallet to receive your rental earnings in XRPs. Statements can be filtered by day or month, and can be downloadable.

Store settings

Users are now able to edit their store level settings, such as store name, URL, description, hours of operation, and even create their own promotions and promo codes.

What’s next for Omni Platform?

 

The next tier in the Omni Platform series is “Omni Standard” which will include all of the features included in Omni Lite plus a whole new set of exciting features that will make it even easier for our customers to manage, grow, and protect their rental businesses.