Overview

Most people own tools and gear they use once, then store forever. Rented lets neighbors lend and borrow instead — without the friction of classifieds or the overhead of a rental shop. I was sole designer across the full mobile experience: onboarding, browse, product pages, and profiles.

Problem

The P2P rental market has two failure modes. Apps like Hygglo front-load heavy verification and lose users before they ever browse. Apps like Craigslist skip trust entirely and feel unsafe at stranger-to-stranger scale. Neither handles the person who wants to rent their drill out on Tuesday and borrow a camera on Saturday — same person, two roles, no platform built for both. Those three gaps shaped every design decision in Rented.

Core Flow

Onboarding The first wireframe pass was conventional — email, password, confirm, submit. It asked for commitment before showing any value, which competitive analysis had already flagged as the main drop-off point for Hygglo. The delivered version leads with the product's value proposition, puts SSO front-and-center (Apple, Google, Facebook), and follows auth with a single category prompt — "What are you renting today?" — that gets a new user browse-ready in under a minute without a verification wall.

Browse The hardest problem was making explore legible across inventory that has nothing in common. A drill and a party tent belong in the same catalog but require completely different browse contexts. A search-first model assumes you know what you're looking for — that fails for the "I need something for a weekend project" use case. The delivered explore surface uses category-led browsing as the primary entry point, with search available but not mandatory. The main unresolved ask at handoff was filter and sort for mixed inventory. Multi-category browse is not a single-category shop, and I hadn't fully cracked it.

Profiles & Listing The profile had to hold two identities at once — renter and lister — without forcing a mode switch. The delivered structure uses a tabbed layout (Listed · Currently Renting · History · Reviews) that treats both roles as equal rather than defaulting to one. The PDP leads with imagery, surfaces the lister's profile and rating immediately below — trust at the point of decision, not buried — and keeps listing metadata scannable rather than buried in a long-form description field.

Outcome

Handoff included a design system, annotated core flows, and an interactive prototype the team could run on their own phones. We aligned on onboarding, profiles, and PDPs. The outstanding ask was a simpler explore with filter and sort for mixed inventory — the surface most likely to drive retention, and the one that needed more cycles. Build paused when engineering reprioritized. The work sharpened how I think about products where the same person plays two roles, catalogs that resist easy categorization, and what it means to design for a small team's real delivery constraints.

What I'd do with more time: usability-test browse and onboarding with real users before handoff, not after. Push explore further — filters, sorts, layout variants for different category densities. Bring the lister path to the same polish as the renter path. Add trust infrastructure — ratings, verification, transaction history — that holds up when a stranger is renting your camera to another stranger.