User research for online furniture rental service

Problem statement

Conduct a survey to understand user needs/demands in online furniture rental space.

Solution

I did research on existing online furniture rental services, talked to some users about their experience and finally conducted a survey for quantitative research.

Survey

I conducted a survey using google forms. It was created with keeping in mind two types of people, one who has experience of renting furniture in the past to know about their pain points and suggestions regarding existing services and other who hasn’t rented yet to know about what are their needs, is stopping them from using these services and what is their expectation.

Survey started with basic questions to know about people, their demographics, personality etc. Then It was divided into two parts based on whether a person has experience of renting online furniture or not. Here is the link to the survey form to know more about the questions.

Link: Rental Furniture Survey Form

Survey Responses

I sent the survey form targeting people of age 18–35 years and living in metro cities of India. I sent a form to friends, Whatsapp groups and status and Community slack channels. I got a total 35+ responses. Here is the link to the response sheet.

Link: Rental Furniture Survey Responses

User Research

Objective:

• To identify the user needs in an online furniture rental space.
• To understand factors affecting the decision of whether to buy or rent furniture.

Hypothesis:

People prefer to rent furniture if,

• quality is assured, price is reasonable, free delivery and maintenance services
• easy, cheap and fast relocation service
• living in rental house and possibility of transfer to other place for work or other reasons
• given option to buy at discounted price after renting for a while
• good package deal is provided

Factors affecting decision to buy or rent:

• quality and cost
• easy to exchange
• used furniture/new furniture
• maintenance and relocation services

Target audience

Target audience is people living/working in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurgaon and of the age of 18 to 35 yrs.

Using Facebook AdManager to predict the number of people satisfying the criteria of our target audience, we get 35,000,000 people.

Target audience size = 35,000,000

Confidence Interval = 95%

Margin of error = 10%

Using Sample Size Calculator, We get sample size = 97

Response rate = 10%

No of people we need to survey = 97*10 = 970

Analysis

Let’s start with some charts.

For people who have rented furniture in the past

For people who haven’t rented any furniture yet

Insights

• More than 70% of the people surveyed are of age 18 to 24yrs. Most of them prefer to rent furniture because of doorstep delivery, easy relocation and don’t want to invest in furniture for now.
• Most of the people who rented furniture before prefer to rent a table, chair, bed and mattress. They prefer to pay rent between 500–2000 Rs per month. They prefer renting furniture for easy delivery, installation and maintenance, easy relocation and customizable rental period. This validates our first hypotheses.
• More than 60% of people who haven’t tried renting yet are interested in renting or buying furniture online in future. Most of them did not buy or rent furniture because of higher cost, quality issues, measurement issues, not much variety, want to feel furniture before making purchase or don’t want used furniture. This validates our second hypotheses.
• 66%+ people who haven’t rented/bought furniture online are interested in renting furniture before buying it.

We also got some suggestions which may apply to many users and we can consider them for upcoming features/enhancements:

• Use of augmented reality. AR is new edge technology which can be used to allow users to see how furniture will look in reality.
• Student friendly furniture.
• Allow users to rent their furniture via this product.

Image source : https://dzineliving.com/the-top-7-defining-characteristics-of-italian-interior-design/

I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments :-)