House to Home

What is House to Home

House to Home is an on-demand, one-stop solution home services app that puts the control back into the hands of homeowners and renters, and aids people in managing their busy lives. Users can find, review, compare prices, schedule, and pay for home service requests as well as get suggestions for home improvement projects all in one place.

Role

Design lead

Tools

Mural, Sketch, Figma, Invision,

Duration

6 months

Overview

Our fictional service-based company noticed that the home service industry is worth billions, however, millennial homeowners and renters have issues finding reliable and affordable home service professionals that return on the value they promise. Adding to this is an apparently prevalent lack of “millennial DIY” knowhow. How can we help people avoid the frustration and headache brought from this reoccurring issue?

Solution: to take advantage of this trend, and in distinction from industry competitors, offer a one-stop solution for finding, reviewing, scheduling and paying for home service requests.

Approach

We utilized the Stanford design thinking process for our approach as you'll see below.

Empathize

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

Empathize

Competitive Analysis

To start out, we conducted a competitive analysis to understand the market more, analyze the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors, and identify gaps that can be exploited. It also helped us determine features our product could benefit from.

I found that none of our competitors had a relatively well-rounded all encompassing home service product. I realized this is a need we could fulfill and that we were on the right track.

Exploratory Research

We then began our exploratory research into the home service industry to have a better understanding of the industry standards.

We asked ourselves why are we doing this? Who is our target audience? How do users find home service professionals? Are there any gaps in the market we could exploit?

We found that:

“75% of home services entrepreneurs said that word of mouth is one of their most important sources of new clients.” This shows they place emphasis on trustworthiness of these professionals
88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations
50% of loyal customers have left a company for a competitor who was able to stay more relevant and better satisfy their needs
Very few companies provide an all encompassing platform that brings users from researching and scheduling to the point of sale all in one place.
Opportunities: Websites commonly provide reviews, so finding and leveraging a succinct and unique way of giving users the information they need to make an informed decision is imperative.
Right now users are forced to visit multiple websites and apps in order to get the information they need including price comparisons, schedule information and payment options.
Online customers noted that proper use of technology by these service professionals helps businesses look more legitimate in the eyes of the consumer.
The users included: home owners, condo owners, renters, middle class individuals

User Surveys

To gain more of an understanding of our users and get quantitative data, I sent out a user survey.

I got 42 responses, who were 20+ in age, with the majority being between the ages of 20-40. These were some of the key findings:

79%

Would prefer to have a one-stop-shop app for home repairs/improvements

66%

Prefer to hire someone rather than DIY

74%

Largely preferred to pay upfront

24%

People who hire professionals through rigorous online research compared to the

74%

People who hire through word of mouth

Interestingly enough, another team with the same project conducted a very similar survey but emerged with completely different results, the users preferred DIY home projects and/or home repairs. This could be attributed to our use of “Guerrilla UX” methods as we had limited time and resources. It may have been in the wording of our questions, where we posted the surveys, demographics, location of responders, or not having a large enough user base? I would suggest collecting information from a larger pool, get more responses and also screen responders to get more homogenous responses.

User Interviews

To get more in-depth insights from potential users, we conducted user interviews. We interviewed 11 users with their age ranges between 23-52 years. of the 11 interviewees, 9 were homeowners, while 2 were renters. Interviewees had the following to say:

“If someone I know and trust has a recommendation, I'd rather go with that than looking online, but if not, I'll go online.”

"If something has to get done it has to get done, don’t budget, as is. Based on necessities"

“If we can do it ourselves, we will, but it doesn't make sense to pay money for supplies to try and DIY something, do it wrong, and have to hire someone anyhow. That’s a waste of time.”

From our interviews, I found that users valued:

Safety, reliability, trust
Online search
Online scheduling
Secure online payment

Define

User Persona

We created a persona to define our user and understand their primary needs. This persona embodies the goals, motivations, behaviors, and frustrations of the users we interviewed and surveyed.

Meet Sarah, she is a 30 year old therapist living in Austin, Texas with her husband and child. She typically enjoys home DIY projects but needs the help of professionals at this stage in her life.

Customer Journey Map

I created a user journey map to show the challenges our users face when searching for and hiring home service professionals.

In Sarah’s case, her first time hiring a professional turned out to be a disaster. Because of her busy schedule, she didn’t have the time to properly research a good service professional, so she picked the first professional she found online. This costs her as she was eventually left with a poorly done job, high costs, and unprofessional service.

Problem statement

From our research, we created the following problem statement

"The tech savvy homeowner wants a convenient and reliable way to compare quality home service professionals tailored to their home needs in order to make the most informed choice to provide safety, security and the best bang for their buck""

Ideate

Initial Sketches

To start out our ideation process, we individually sketched out divergent concepts. We did this to explore different ways to approach the problem of our user. This eventually allowed us to put together our best ideas to create the product. I created sketches that followed along with our customer journey map. The sketches showcase the home, search, company profile, price compare , and the payment screens.

Home Screen

Low fidelity wire frames

I further fleshed out my sketches by creating low fidelity wireframes. Originally, I had thought to leave the messaging & other contact options within the company profile screen alone, however, because we eventually added in a video chat feature, I decided it would be better to create a separate message section which contained the video chat feature that will be seen below.

Home Screen

Brainwriting & Site/App Map

To converge our designs, we started I suggested a brainwriting session. Our brainwriting session followed the customer journey map we created earlier. A team member would start with an idea and write it down on a virtual sticky note, then the next team member would read what was written and add their idea to it on another virtual sticky note and it would continue for a few rounds. This helped us all to put down and connect our individual ideas for the app. We also created a site/app map which not only showcased the structure, content and functions of our product, but also helped us agree on the concepts we wanted to implement in our product and further converge our designs.

Mid-fidelity Wireframes and Prototype

Now that we were ready with all the information, ideating insights, wireframe guidelines, we fully converged our designs and created mid-fidelity wireframes. While we ended up going with my designs as the basis for the entire app, I remained in charge of the search, company profile, compare prices, and schedule flow. We used these wireframes to create a prototype for usability testing. The following screens used to breakdown this app have been modified by me to better fit my vision for the product.

Onboarding

Users begin their journey with the onboarding process. They input their login information, their housing information, as well as make selections that will allow for personalized suggestions in the app.

Home & Search

Home screen: contains the search bar which contains a drop down menu, a “browse by category” option containing home service categories, a “trending” section, as well as recommendations tailored to the users needs.
Search screen: contains a list of service professionals that specialize in the user’s specified field. The lists contain quick information about the company/service professional as well as their customer ratings Users can quickly save professionals they like by hitting the like button.

Company info

The company profile screen shows all the information the user would need to make an informed decision on a service professional. It contains the company’s information, customer reviews, company autobiography, gallery, and compare price button.

Price Compare & Schedule

Price Compare: users can use the price compare button to compare the prices of similar companies/service professionals in the same vicinity. The page also contains quick information about these other companies/service professionals
Schedule: users can schedule the date and time for a service professional to come and work on their home. They select from the available dates and times provided by the service professional.

Messaging

Users can chat with service professionals through the app. They also have the option of video chatting with the service professional, allowing the service professionals to better access what needs to be done/fixed.

Projects & Payment

Users can chat with service professionals through the app. They also have the option of video chatting with the service professional, allowing the service professionals to better access what needs to be done/fixed.

Click to View Prototype

Usability testing & Findings

We conducted usability test to validate our work, get a fresh perspective at this time of our process, note our gaps, and reiterate on our product. We tracked task success rate, error frequency, time on task and user related task difficulty

11

Participants

100%

Task completion rate

0.33m

Avg time to complete task in minutes

17%

Error rate

We found that;

User found it inconvenient navigating back to the profile page after going to messages from the company profile
User’s were confused about bottom navigation and recommended labeling each icon.
User also recommended changing the explore icon to a home icon for less confusion
User recommended adding a GPS feature to track the professional before they arrive to your house
User recommended to add the service hours in the invoice to better track the hours worked
User recommends to add Google Pay to the list of payment options

*! Disclaimer: some factors that may have affected user testing outcomes include:

Sample size may not be representative of all people that may use the product
Using a prototype tool like Invision may have impacted navigability, as glitches commonly occur while viewing prototypes
Human error and misinterpretation of qualitative feedback may affect the results to slight but varying degrees.