House to Home

View Prototype

The Project

House to Home is a mobile application created at Flatiron in a group of 4. The project consisted of 4-5 sprints in which each member had the chance to be a Product Manager. During my week as Product Manager, I lead my team from the beginning of User Interviews to synthesizing feedback, and to the start of divergent concepts.

Duration: 5 weeks

Methods: Exploratory Research, Competitive Analysis, Affinity Diagramming, Customer Journey Mapping, Brainstorming, Story Board, How-Now-Wow Matrix, Wireframing

Tools: Sketch, Figma, Mural, Xtensio, Invision

The Challenge

The home services industry is worth billions, but millennial homeowners and renters alike report difficulty in finding reliable and affordable contractors that return on the value they promise. Compounded by a seemingly ubiquitous lack of millennial DIY know how, this is a problem that has been long led to frustration and headache for homeowners and renters.

The Goal: To focus building on the consumer side of the platform. My team has been asked to assess the full end-to-end customer journey of the home repairs process in order to build a home service marketplace that brings, ease, transparency and control to users.

The Process

Under Research and Industry Insights

My team and I began an exploratory research on the home service industry to get a better understanding of this market.

During exploratory research, my teammates and I found sources through Contractor Digital Market Statistics, Home Advisor Cost Repairs, Blue Corona, and Blue Corona articles. The qualitative and quantitative data are pulled from these resources.

Other resources in the Home Service Market

• Home Services State of Spending Report

• Contractor Digital Marketing Statistics

• Joint Center for Housing Studies Remodeling and Repair Spending Report

Competitors in the home service market

My team and I did a competitor analysis and these are the companies we did an evaluation on. We found that our lead direct competitors in this market were Home Advisor, Home Depot while an approaching competitor was Amazon Home Services. These companies offer a wide range of services from licensed professionals while our indirect competitors Handy, TaskRabbit, and Groupon don’t necessarily require individuals to be licensed.

We then compared 2 direct competitors and 1 indirect competitor and noticed some gaps.

The gap within our competitors:

• Transparency is lacking in the market place

• A need for a well established, vetting system to screen quality licensed professionals

• An option to pay virtually to save time

Defining our User

These are the methods we used to identify our User

While synthesizing our data through the method of affinity diagramming, we were able to conclude some findings such as our users:

• prefer to pay via online or already use an online payment method vs. paying on the phone or in person

• would prefer DIYed smaller projects or tasks but will hire a professional for bigger projects

We created a custom journey map to show the challenges Sarah V. faces while searching and hiring a home service professional.

In Sarah’s case, she is new to the area and has experienced bad customer service before. This journey outlines the steps she took to hire a home service professional.

Creating User Stories to describe user wants to achieve

As a busy professional I need a seamless way to schedule online.

As a consumer I want to be able to choose to pay after the work is done. I want whoever I hire to do the work right.

As a user who cares about quality experiences, I need each option to be ranked and reviewed by other people so I can decide if it’s worth going to.

As a mother I want to be able to virtually connect with the home service professional before I make an informed decision.

Divergent concepts

Sketches and Wireframing

Converging our Ideas

Ideation Artifacts

Solution

Solution 1: Searching for a quality plumbing service, reading company information and reviews

Solution 4: Sarah being able to view her invoice and then paying with Apply Pay after the home service professional has completed the service

Usability Test Plan and Results

Analysis

After recruiting and screening, 8 participants were tested. We based our results on 4 factors using the likert scale using:

• average completion rate

• average error rate,

• average time to complete the task,

• average rate of level difficulty for each of the 9 tasks

Users found that level of difficulty was 5 (1 being very difficult and 5 being very easy) and a completion rate of 100%. Although, we received a positive outcome our takeaway was how do we decrease the error rate and time to complete tasks.

Key takeaways

How do we get to 0% error rate and how do we decrease the average time to complete tasks from 33 seconds to less than 10 seconds?

Recommendations for Improvement

According to the users, we compiled our user’s test and compiled these recommendations:

• 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

Next Steps

According to the recommendations, my team would:

• Revisit and explore what users like such as re-discover Navigation,

• GPS included within the app. This feature would be similar to Uber and Lyft. This feature would allow the consumer to be prepared for the arrival of the home service professional. 

• Add service hours to invoice, etc. Another step we would take is adding service hours to the invoice. Since the wages of professional work per hour. This would allow both consumers and contractors to keep aligned with payment.

• Reiterate on the changes and keep testing

• Create a High-Fidelity Prototype

My Thoughts

I learned that although there were big competitors in the home service market (Home Depot, Home Advisor, Amazon Home Services), we were still able to find a gap within this market. In-depth research and using competitive analysis to break down features are highly necessary in order to build a great product. It's just one of the micro-steps in the process to hone in on.

Next Steps

My recommendations for moving forward is to test the updated prototype and to enhance certain features:

• Further explore a GPS tracking system to track the professional before they arrive at the house to tackle user pain points.

• Building a personalized recommendations list based on the user’s home. ie: Maintenance schedule that is up-to-date with past service records, recommendations based on location (solar panels in high-temperature climates or tin roofing for cold, snowy climates).

• Adding the service hours into the invoice to better track the hours worked for transparency.

• Further explore and research different payment payments that would include Google Pay and PayPal.