Becoming a first-time homeowner is a difficult and sometimes overwhelming process and it doesn't end after moving in. Owning a home comes with a new set of responsibilities, the main one: maintaining it. It’s something everyone knows they should do, but most just don’t know where to start.

Homebuddy is a digital tool that simplifies home maintenance by creating an automatic home maintenance plan, giving timely reminders of maintenance needs, and supplying a kit of basic home maintenance tools. Ryan, the CEO and sole employee, was inspired to create this product after struggling with his own home maintenance as a first-time homeowner. We were tasked with taking an alpha version of this product and building a more user-centered version that helped homeowners manage home maintenance tasks and schedule time with professionals in a way that earns revenue for the product.

I wanted to understand how people learn to do home maintenance in the first place to prepare to incorporate educational elements in our design. Through this, I discovered that deciding between doing a project themselves or calling a professional was a unique factor to consider. I found it’s generally recommended homeowners avoid doing any work themselves that could risk serious damage to their home, or requires tools and skills that could put their physical wellbeing in danger. Also, while DIY can save money, the time a person spends doing it should be considered when measuring cost.

Analyzing our competitors

While researching these broader subjects, we wanted to know what the competition was doing, so we analyzed a few direct competitors: HomeBinder, Porch, HomeZada, HomeSpot, and Dwellbeing. Ryan felt Homebuddy was unique because it assists users across an entire journey: from creating maintenance plans and managing maintenance tasks to providing DIY instructions and connecting them to professionals.

We found this was mostly correct; the majority of competitors don’t have a product that assisted users throughout this entire journey. However, we discovered a competitor that does all of this: Dwellbeing. We discussed this with Ryan and he decided to move the product forward without any major changes, however as we progressed in our design we knew we needed to include ways to differentiate the product through our design.

Additionally, I offered a strategy recommendation that he could differentiate his product by focusing his messaging on data privacy. Dwellbeing is connected with Liberty Mutual Insurance and likely collects the data on these homes as part of their business model. With increased consumer concerns with how digital products use their data, Homebuddy can be a more consumer-friendly option.

Understanding our users’ needs

When developing our user questions, we struggled initially with how to plan our questions for homeowners who don’t have experience with home maintenance; and it didn’t help that I had little-to-no experience with home maintenance myself. After speaking with our creative director, I realized we could include a line of questioning that involved tangential experiences like scheduling a professional from a cable company or assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. In the end, all of our users had experience with maintenance or repairs, but I was glad to develop this tactic to use in future research.

Guiding our direction

After synthesizing this data, I wanted to explore our users’ journey in a journey map. I realized in past projects that user journeys are the best way for me to identify users’ biggest problems and the opportunities to intervene and change these behaviors. This also provided a tool to help our client build empathy with users as he was not speaking with them directly. I decided to map out a user’s journey from buying a home to learning about preventative maintenance.

Seeing this lowest point informed the ‘why’ behind our problem statement:

First-time homeowners need a streamlined guide on preventative maintenance that helps them effortlessly manage both professional and DIY projects so they can care for their home and avoid expensive repairs.

Initially, the problem statement was focused on a ‘comprehensive’ guide as that is what we felt our users indicated through user interviews, but our client was very determined to make something that was simple rather than comprehensive and incorporated only the basics of what a user would need. Because of this, we agreed a ‘streamlined’ guide would better fit his vision.

After identifying the problem we developed design principles to create alignment with our client of how we planned to move forward in designing this product. I struggled a bit with this because the principles we developed felt similar to my past projects. After speaking with our creative director, I felt more comfortable embracing similar themes and realized I could develop these principles by utilizing my previous knowledge and applying it to the challenges of this specific problem.

When we presented these to Ryan, he reported feeling like they didn’t focus on the users he wanted to target. We realized the majority of our touch-points throughout this sprint were with users who were likely to be proactive about their home maintenance. Ryan wanted to target users who would take a hands-off approach and have maintenance done for them because they offered a better source of revenue by hiring professionals. To help us understand these two distinct user groups, we created proto-personas:

Creating these proto-personas was very enlightening. I started to move away from using personas in my process because of potential stereotyping, so using proto-personas felt like the right balance of defining two distinct groups without making too many assumptions about who they are. This also helped us realize there are aspects of both groups in the users we interviewed so we could move forward confidently considering both types of users.

Finding inspiration

We sought out inspiration from products that did a great job of presenting interactions in their design that fit the concepts we envisioned. We decided to look to outside of just home maintenance and take inspiration from competitors who excelled in their own domains with designs and interactions that would be a good fit for our concepts.

We sketched out paper prototypes and tested these concepts with four users. Through testing, we found they were overwhelmingly drawn to the side by side concept—though all of the users we tested fell into our process-focused homeowner proto-persona. However, there were parts of each concept that tested well with users:

1. Helping users understand their highest-priority tasks

2. Providing simplified comparisons so they could make decisions

3. Offering different mediums of learning so they could choose which method to use

Converging our designs

To adequately meet the needs of both of our proto-personas and our client, we felt we needed to use pieces from all three concepts. We decided the best way to serve our process-focused homeowner was to keep the comparisons as a feature throughout the product, both when deciding which projects to tackle themselves and when selecting a professional to come to their home. Even though it was not a priority of Ryan’s, we wanted to keep educational materials in our solution because we heard from users that this created value for them and would motivate them to visit homebuddy in the first place. And to meet Ryan’s business needs and design for our busy procrastinator, we included four revenue options:

• An air filter subscription service
• A home maintenance orientation
• Purchasing materials and tools through affiliate links
• Hiring professionals through Homebuddy

As a team, we mapped out the site’s hierarchy to understand how users would navigate throughout the interface and decided to include four main areas:

1. An onboarding flow that gathered information about user’s homes
2. A dashboard with automatically generated tasks that expanded to show side-by-side comparisons of completing the tasks themselves or with a professional
3. A secondary page of “home 101” where users could explore educational articles
4. A flow for users to hire a professional

The side-by-side comparisons and hire a pro flow offered a way to differentiate from Dwellbeing by assisting users in making decisions for themselves and providing a list of maintenance professionals that fit the users’ availability.

I was tasked with designing the hire a pro flow. I needed a way to populate a list of maintenance professionals that fit a user’s availability without knowing exact time slots when the professional was available. I realized Ryan could gather general information on availability and created a flow based on this.

I also incorporated additional concept testing in this flow by providing five options with variable prices, a variable number of reviews, and ‘Homebuddy Certified’ badges. This would help us understand which factors were most important to users and whether Homebuddy Certified badges would influence their decision.

Overall users enjoyed its comprehensiveness and felt it wasn’t overly long. In fact, they wanted to input even more information. We felt this was going overboard so we proposed a future recommendation of including an optional flow to include more detailed information about the user’s home and appliances.

Dashboard

Users enjoyed the task list and the feeling of accomplishment they got from completing tasks. They also felt the side-by-side comparisons allowed them to do the research they would already do but without the additional effort. Users often skipped over the highlighted task and did not view it as part of the task list. Users also did not notice the home 101 navigation in the side navigation. We knew we needed to make a more cohesive task list and increase discoverability for the home 101 section.

While testing the hire a pro flow, users were confused by only being able to enter their general availability so I knew moving forward we needed to give users more granular options for entering their schedule. The conceptual testing of this flow gave us insights we felt were very useful for our client. Users were willing to pay $20 more for a professional who is Homebuddy Certified, as long as they had details as to which factors are used to certify them. We felt this was a potential way for him to earn additional revenue through hiring professionals or to get higher-quality and higher-priced professionals onboard.

One variable I failed to consider was the perceived gender of home maintenance professionals. I used a combination of traditionally male and female names and during testing, a user made a comment I interpreted as him viewing a woman as being less capable as a professional. While I still think it’s great to provide a representation of diversity whenever possible, in the future I will be more cognizant of how this can be a variable that may bias users.

DIY instructions

Users enjoyed that the Hire a pro CTA gave them an easy route to a professional if they found the task to be more difficult than they expected, and Ryan enjoyed that this pointed users toward revenue-earning options.

Finalizing our design

As we came to the end of our final sprint, we were ready to iterate our design based on the results of our usability testing. We focused on the interactions and content that were unclear to users.

Dashboard

This final deliverable met and exceeded what we were tasked to do in our kickoff meeting. We created a flow that gathers enough home information from users without overwhelming them and causing them to abandon the flow, we created a task list that merges what Ryan envisioned with comparison information our users desired during interviews, created a streamlined process for users to find a professional without Ryan needing to call them personally, and throughout all of this kept business needs in mind to ensure our product would meet revenue goals.

Planning for the future

We accomplished a lot in three weeks, but there was still plenty more to do. We wanted to make sure we prepared Ryan to continue to evolve his product so we provided a list of recommendations for him moving forward:

We felt these strategy recommendations would help Homebuddy continue to grow and further define itself in the market. By continuing to develop features in the task list, fully integrating with professionals, and offering additional home services, Ryan can further differentiate from competitors like Dwellbeing.

Reflecting on the experience

Overall this was a successful partnership where my team and I were able to overcome challenges and use our design skills to strategize with business goals and create a product that helps users accomplish their goals.

During this experience, I took the skills I developed over the last six months at Designation in research, synthesis, interaction design, and working with stakeholders and used them to building a digital interface that meets both user and business needs; I further solidified my process of analyzing user journeys throughout the process to keep their perspective and needs in mind; I continued to use my empathy skills both in understanding users and to work effectively with a team of fellow designers; and I realized I should see similarities with past projects as an opportunity to take what I learned from those experiences and adapt them to a new problem.

As my fifth Designation project, and third working with a client, I feel prepared to continue to use these skills and processes as a UX designer in the workforce and continue to learn new tactics and perspectives with each unique challenge and new problem to solve.