Product Leechy
A student-focused rental marketplace designed to simplify item discovery and listing. By combining conversational AI, guided workflows, and contextual recommendations, Leechy helps students rent, lend, and discover items with less friction.
Details
Founding Product Designer
Team: Founder
Scope: 0 to 1 Product Strategy, UX/UI, Design System, AI Integration
Problem Friction in Peer-to-Peer Rentals
Traditional rental marketplaces often require users to navigate lengthy forms, search through scattered listings, and manually find answers to common questions. For students looking to quickly rent or list items, these barriers created unnecessary friction and increased support requests.
Solution A Conversational Rental Experience
I designed a chat-based experience that guides users through listing, discovery, and support workflows using conversational AI. By combining structured prompts, contextual recommendations, and natural language interactions, the platform simplifies rental tasks while maintaining transparency throughout the process.
Result Faster Listings, Fewer Support Requests
The redesigned experience reduced listing time by 75% and decreased support tickets by 25%, helping students complete rental tasks more efficiently while reducing operational overhead.
GOALS + NORTH STAR
To design a conversational rental platform that simplifies peer-to-peer transactions for students.
Reduce Friction: Simplify listing and discovery workflows through guided conversational experiences.
Improve Efficiency: Help users complete rental tasks faster while reducing repetitive support requests.
Increase Transparency: Provide clear information and contextual guidance throughout the rental journey.
Scale Growth: Establish a flexible conversational framework capable of supporting future marketplace and AI features.
PROCESS + KEY INSIGHTS
I conducted workflow analysis, competitive research, and experience mapping to better understand where students struggled when renting and listing items online.
Key Insight 1: Form Fatigue
Traditional listing experiences require users to complete lengthy forms before publishing an item. This created unnecessary friction and slowed marketplace participation.
Key Insight 2: Discovery Friction
Students often knew what they needed but struggled to navigate categories, filters, and search interfaces to find it quickly.
Key Insight 3: Repetitive Support Loops
Many support requests centered around the same questions regarding listings, rentals, and marketplace policies, creating avoidable operational overhead.
SOLUTION
Leechy, a conversational marketplace experience designed around guided interactions, contextual recommendations, and AI-assisted support.
By combining chatbot workflows, structured listing creation, and natural language search, the platform helps students complete rental tasks with less effort and greater confidence.
DESIGN 1/3
The conversational listing flow
eliminating form fatigue
This feature guides users through item listing using a structured chat experience rather than traditional forms. By breaking complex listing tasks into simple conversational steps, it directly addresses the insight that lengthy forms discourage participation. The result is a faster and more approachable listing experience.
DESIGN 2/3
Suggested question bubbles
reducing input friction
This feature surfaces common questions and actions as selectable prompts within the chat interface. By allowing users to tap instead of type, it directly addresses repetitive support behaviors while helping users navigate the platform more efficiently.
DESIGN 3/3
AI-powered rental assistant
guiding users through discovery
This feature uses contextual responses and retrieval-augmented search to help users find relevant information, discover listings, and resolve questions within a single conversation. By centralizing guidance into one interface, it reduces the need to navigate multiple screens and support resources.
WHAT I WOULD DO NEXT…
Introduce predictive listing creation
Conversational AI is one of the fastest growing areas where AI is being used extensively to reduce manual workflows. Leveraging it, I'd focus on introducing predictive listing creation primarily focused on generating item descriptions, pricing suggestions, and listing details from minimal user input.
(coming soon)
Experiment a little with the marketplace experience
(coming soon)
