U-HAUL HOMEPAGE · LIVE PROJECT
Turning the homepage into an action hub
© U-Haul Homepage
ROLE
Lead Designer
TIMELINE
10 Weeks
TEAM
17-person cross-functional team
SKILLS
Content StrategyUX StrategyCross-functional LeadershipDesign Systems
PROBLEM
Reservations lacked a clear homepage overview
The U-Haul homepage is a key touchpoint for customers, but it lacked a clear overview of upcoming reservations. Users often struggled to find details like pickup time, location, or next steps — driving more support calls.
Journey Mapping
Mapped the end-to-end truck lifecycle across pickup, use, and return to identify where customers lost the most time.
Field Research
Observed customers at pickup locations during peak weekend hours to see firsthand where lines, confusion, and delays formed.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Partnered with ops and store teams to validate that proposed changes were feasible within existing rental hardware and staffing constraints.
SOLUTION
Order cards as at-a-glance action hubs
By introducing order cards on the homepage, we can provide at-a-glance visibility into active and upcoming reservations. These cards act as action hubs — surfacing key details, next steps, and quick links — reducing friction, lowering support requests, and building user confidence from the very first screen.
CORE FLOWS
Three rounds to get the visual hierarchy right
First design: grouped by date, but limited space to start the process and lacked scalability. Second design: added structure, but still missed visual impact and failed to guide attention. Final design: bold imagery and clear hierarchy made key details easy to spot, act on, and follow. Especially when juggling multiple orders from different businesses, strong visuals proved key to keeping users oriented and focused.
Mobile Reservation
Let customers reserve and pay for their truck ahead of time, so pickup becomes a formality instead of a transaction.
Remote Verification
Move license and identity verification into the app, removing the front-desk bottleneck during peak hours.
Self-Serve Pickup
Give customers a way to unlock and inspect the truck on their own, so staff are only needed for exceptions.
Iteration
A flexible framework for scalable order cards
We developed a flexible framework for scalable order cards that could adapt not just in content, but in interaction type and business logic — spanning truck reservations and storage orders, each with their own set of states from quote through completion. This ensured the system could support multiple services without sacrificing clarity or adding overhead to the team.
Design
Strategic directions
Three Bets on How Self-Service Should Work
The directions that shaped the final pickup experience.
Tradeoff: This surfaced during an internal team session, where we mapped the customer journey and curated opportunities and open research questions from it. One idea we explored was a Bird/Lime-style approach to help customers locate their truck in a lot — but retrofitting sensors across U-Haul's existing fleet wasn't cost-effective at scale. We chose a lighter-weight solution instead: an in-app navigation map paired with clear parking lot labeling, so customers could find their truck without new hardware.
Confidence Before Commitment
Show truck size, pickup steps, and ID requirements before the reservation is confirmed, so nothing about pickup day comes as a surprise.
Verification, Not Interrogation
Move license and ID verification into the app before pickup, so the in-person moment feels like confirmation, not a checkpoint.
Fail Gracefully
Design clear fallback paths, like calling support or flagging an attendant, for the edge cases self-service can't solve on its own.
reflections
What I learned
Testing in the Real World
Testing with real customers at an actual pickup location surfaced friction a clickable prototype would never have caught.
Design and Build
Rapid prototyping let me test multiple entry patterns with real customers before committing engineering resources — collapsing the gap between design and validation.
Clarity Over Convenience
Showing customers what to expect before pickup outperformed adding more automation — a reminder that trust is built through clarity, not just speed.
U-Haul Truck Reservation
U-Haul Homepage