MAKE A GOOD LIFE BY MAKING A GOOD HOME
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
With so many resources for home improvement planning in person and online, the user needed a way to simplify the home improvement planning process. My role was to identify needs in the home improvement planning process and create solutions to address these needs. The result was the Goodhome app - a tool to allow our user to easily and confidently plan home improvement projects.
SCOPE OF WORK
RESEARCH
Market Research
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
STRATEGY
User Persona
Empathy Map
Ideation
Storyboarding
UX DESIGN
Userflow
Wireframes
Prototype
Usability Testing
Design Iteration
UI DESIGN
Visual Design
Branding
Style Guide
SUMMARY
A common goal is make our homes a place we love to be - a place that works well for our needs. Planning home improvement projects can be overwhelming, finding trusted professionals in the time frame needed can be difficult, finding the time and motivation to take on projects can be daunting and it can be hard to determine if taking on a home project will be worth the time and effort in terms of improvement in quality of life or increased home value.
Goodhome was designed to address these common user pain points. The user is walked through steps to determine the project, visualize the potential project design, get recommended professionals specific to project needs and estimate a return on investment based on the project location and value of the home. The user can then easily save these plans and keep track of budget, contractor estimates and potential visual directions for each of their home improvement dreams. The planning steps are kept simple to make the process fun and inspiring. By visualizing and dreaming, as well as estimating the return for a specific project, a user may be more inspired to act on home improvement project dreams.
PROCESS
Research
User research was conducted through surveys and through video conferencing interviews. Through this user research, common pain points emerged among users in their experiences with home improvement project planning. Pain points included having trouble finding trusted professionals in the time frame needed, lack of motivation and time, inability to determine whether a home improvement project would be worth the time and money investment for the return of quality of life improvement and increased market value of the home, and the inability to easily visualize how a final design might look.
“I am a person who is inspired by what I see and it is hard for me to visualize what a completed project might look like.”
There were commonalities on what was working in the users’ home improvement planning experiences. Things that were working in the user’s project planning experiences included letting experts figure it out, consulting with professionals for advice, finding trusted professionals through word of mouth or ratings, looking at inspiration through Pinterest or Google, comparing prices in the store and taking photos of project inspiration in stores and in neighborhoods. Users said it would be nice to be able to visualize project designs, to be able to easily find trusted professionals and to be able to easily estimate return on investment for a specific project type.
Through market research, I discovered there were quite a few home improvement visualization apps, home improvement retailers with advice and supplies, websites to find top rated professionals for specific projects, and online calculators that determine return on investment based on home location and type of project. In fact, tools exist for all of the user pain points and needs, but I could not find where a user could easily address these home improvement planning needs all in one place.
STRATEGY
A persona was created based on the user feedback. This user named Jonathan would like a way to easily visualize a project, determine the return on investment and get recommendations for top professionals to consult with on project needs. With this need fulfilled, he could feel more confident in moving forward on his home improvement projects.
An empathy map was created from feedback obtained in user interviews in order to easily understand and empathize with the user.
IDEATION
From the user persona and empathy map, we could more easily understand the needs of our user. A problem statement was determined to provide a clear focus to the problem that needed to be solved for this user.
“How might we make home improvement project planning easy, well informed and efficient?”
From this problem statement, a process called Crazy 8s was utilized in the ideation phase. For five minutes every 40 seconds, a rough thumbnail sketch was created to get ideas flowing quickly without getting into too much detail on any one thing. This allowed as many ideas and perspectives to be flushed out.
Ideas from this rough ideation phase were a sketched out a little more clearly, while still allowing room for further exploration.
From these, sketches of the app pages were created, addressing the user needs and focusing on the problem statement and continuing to focus on addressing the user pain points - inability to visualize, inability to easily determine return on investment and inability to easily find top rated professionals specific to project needs. The four main categories from these pain points to address were educating, finding inspiration, visualizing and finding top professionals.
BRANDING
For the Goodhome branding, I first explored words that described what home improvement project planning for a well-lived life in a good home was all about. These words were listed out. Synonyms to life and home were explored - such as house craft, domesticity and others. Goodhome was chosen as the brand name, as it fit well with the intention of simple, home project planning to create a good home. Images were gathered that gave the feel of well-built, quality materials along with thoughtful, intentional design and living. A color palette and logo were created to encompass simplicity, focused attention, natural materials, the warmth of a good home and easy project planning.
A mood board was created with the images gathered, representing the adjectives for Goodhome.
This lead to inform the brand style tile, a visual reference point, which informed UI for the app.
A visual design of the pages was created with the four key areas to address user pain points. This design was later simplified to address a much more focused user flow, but gave a visual design starting point.
UX DESIGN
User flow was created to simplify the the home improvement planning process for the user. This flow focused on visualization of a specific project, with project-specific inspiration and project-specific designs to apply to the user’s location. The flow also included a tool to determine an approximate return on investment as well as recommendations for top-rated professionals, specific to the project, in the user’s area.
STORYBOARD
Further research was done on current home improvement apps and form stylings. Apps such as Instagram and Spotify were explored a bit as well, as these apps do so well at making the user experience simple, streamlined and intuitive, which is exactly what was needed for our home improvement user. I also researched the interface of Procreate and Photoshop for the iPad, since this app would be primarily best utilized on the iPad and it would utilize a simplified visual editor for the planning page. I made notes on elements and functionality that was most simple and intuitive. I then made a rough, rough storyboard, closely following the user flow, integrating my research.
App page sketches were created, keeping with the more simple and intuitive user flow.
Low fidelity wireframes were created in Figma, closely following the site sketches.
Medium fidelity wireframes were created with specific porch addition project photography. Icons were adjusted to work with this specific porch project. A medium-fidelity prototype was created from here for usability testing.
For the usability testing, users were recorded as they clicked through the app. From these recordings, notes were taken and commonalities were found in user feedback. An affinity map was created to more easily analyze the usability feedback. This map gave me a clear path on what needed to be adjusted, to make the user experience better, based on specific user feedback. Some users wanted a description of the app on the introduction page, as they were unclear on what the app was about. There was frustration about being asked for home value and location at the start of the app, as users felt they would be more comfortable giving this information only after a plan was established and they had a reason to provide more personal information. Users were also confused by buttons that looked like form fields in the About Project section. A few users suggested using a drop down menu instead. Form fields at the top of the Planning Page confused users, as they thought they needed to fill in the fields. Users also wanted larger buttons and more clarity on next steps on the Planning Page. One user said that they would like to see multiple porch options to send to contractors - not just one. And a a few users were unclear on which placed images were porch designs and which images were inspiration. Multiple users wanted an option to send the plan to multiple contractors for bids, and to save the project as a favorite.
A second iteration of the prototype was created based on the valuable usability testing feedback. A description was added to the first page to describe the app. The home address and market value forms were moved later in the flow, until after the user established a project design, and before a recommended contractor was requested. Drop downs replaced buttons and certain form fields, where it made more intuitive sense. Form fields at the top of the planning page were removed, and information calculated for the project was simply stated here. Direction was added on the planning page for each next step by making icons bolder and adding labels. Labels were added to make more clear which images were porch designs on the user’s home and which images were inspiration. A button was added to the final Planning Page to send to another contractor easily. The original visual styling was integrated back into this final design.
One final usability test lead to this final design and flow.
REFLECTION
The home improvement industry is growing and there are so many ways to approach planning a home improvement project, so it can be overwhelming to know what steps to take. Through my research on the industry and focus on making a good home through home improvement, I found myself somewhat overwhelmed at how to streamline the home improvement planning process. So many resources exist - from big box retailers, to contractor finders, to home project visualization apps, as well as the ability to find never ending amounts of inspiration on Pinterest. Anyone who wants to plan home improvement today must go to many different sites and locations to gather the information to plan. It wasn’t until I considered the user flow that I was able to simplify the user’s process of planning a project. The user flow focuses the planning for the user, specific to a user’s particular project. This made even more clear to me the importance of user flow in addressing user needs. For some user needs, including this specific app, a clear user flow is the solution. The visual design is the icing. If I were to change anything about the way I approached this project, it would absolutely be to start with the user flow earlier in the process. However, the way that I went about things for this project - visual design and concept first and user flow later - clearly illustrated the importance in user flow, especially in improving the user experience. It took much longer this way, but it taught me something. User flow and structure is always before visual design. I might also get professional photography to more closely align with the branding and style tile. However, I do think the photography used shows a more realistic depiction of the app in use, and how it might look with a user’s actual home photos.