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The Moving Buddy
The Moving Buddy was first conceptualized when a team member noted the tedious and painful process of moving furniture. Over an eleven-week quarter, my team and I worked to find a solution to this problem and created a final product fit for the market: The Moving Buddy.
Role / Product designer
Date / Fall 2020
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Skills / Product management, Design
thinking, Prototyping
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How can we make moving furniture more user friendly?
The products currently on the market were riddled with problems. Needing an excess amount of strength, scratching floors, and not working on all floor types were only some of the issues we observed during testing.
A competitive product we
benchmarked
We want a versatile, easy to use, efficient product
These criteria were narrowed down for a list of 11 needs we heard from users. These three encompassed the primary needs from users and of a product of this nature.
Versatile - works on both soft and hard floors, able to attach to most furniture items
Easy to use - requires little effort to move the furniture once attached, able to stay attached to furniture while in use
Efficient - able to go over bumps without failing, doesn’t scratch floor
Prototyping
Different attachment methods on prototypes (left: velcro, right: foam)
Going into our shop session, we had a clear plan of how we wanted our prototype to be designed. As is common with first drafts, once it was designed the functionality wasn't what we hoped. Using extra strength velcro to attach to the furniture was not creating the strong bond we needed, and we found balance and slipping to be big issues when testing. Jumping into problem solving mode, we messed around with the placement of the prototype on the furniture, but still found stability was lacking, and also tried a few different attachment methods, foam and clamps, which did not solve the problem either.
Taking a step back, we took some time to brainstorm new ideas and decided to add a bar for stability. The balance problem was the main factor causing our prototype to fail, and adding a bar connecting two of the wheels together proved to create a very stable, easily balanced system. Through testing, this prototype easily passed our outlined criteria.
Final prototype with connecting bar
The final design
A semi-permanent attachment for regularly moving furniture. A telescoping rod connected to caster wheels allows for usage on a wide array of furniture items while not compromising the quality of the wheels.
CAD of design fully collapsed and extended.
Final prototype
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