Challenge

• Understand current pain points to home renovation and maintenance felt by homeowners
• Develop appropriate behavior nudges to motivate homeowners to plan and complete home projects
• Design a friction-less end-to-end experience from project choice to project completion

Problem

Home preservation is integral to prevent community blight and drop in home value.

For newer homeowners (we defined as under 4 years), there are often a myriad of content and platforms they have to navigate to determine what projects are of high value, effort level, or whether it’s a DIY or contractor job.

For long-term homeowners (10+ years), there are not many dedicated tools to help manage a home project or to track its increase in home value over time.

Approach

• Conduct generative research to understand key pain points for homeowners in starting and completing home maintenance and renovation projects
• Test initial prototypes of feature set to determine what high-level features are desirable
• Determine target audience of homeowners with a quantitative study
• Design end-to-end user flow that provides positive nudges to homeowners to complete projects
• Conduct in-market testing to measure which value propositions resonates the most

Research uncovered 3 major pain points:

1. Finding trusted sources of instructional information for home projects
2. Knowing where to begin home projects and what value it served short and long-term
3. Understanding whether a project should be DIY or contractor job.

The value proposition struck a strong chord with first-time and new homeowners. This group wanted help to plan and manage projects, learn how to fix or renovate, and manage finances.

It was important to tie home value to home projects to show the long-term value of doing even small home projects like cleaning gutters or installing a new faucet. We highlighted this as well as key value propositions in the orientation screens below.

We laid out low-fidelity wireframes to map out the user flow from orientation to choosing a project, noting that there were two paths to reach the project pages — one from onboarding and the second from the nav. Working with our designer, we discussed what would be the most direct path be from onboarding to project selection.

We continued to mock up screens to show what a project dashboard, project page, and a DIY instructions page would look like and if it would be efficient and meaningful to include such a robust feature set for the MVP.

After deciding on the key feature sets, it was necessary to do an in-market test to validate which value proposition resonated the most so we can focus on what features to include in the MVP to make sure it’s lean and mean and not a bloated app. The in-market test included a two week Google ad campaign with custom pages built for 4 use cases:

1. Home value & project ROI: Estimate your return on home project investments, track your home’s value over time
2. Cost estimates & savings: Get more accurate project cost estimates, receive maintenance reminders
3. Project planning & decision-making: Home project recs for your space, budget, and goals, help deciding between DIY and a pro
4. Project tracking & DIY education: Step-by-step DIY education for any home project, track your projects to stay organized

We found that the use cases with the most traction solved for the financial aspects of home projects and guidance for DIY projects. Consumers wanted to know what projects helped increase the value of their home most and those projects were driven by bigger renovation jobs vs maintenance ones. They were also attracted to the “tools” solutions since they signal clear tangible benefits but it has to be focused vs broad feature set.

OUTCOME 

The in-market testing validated what we heard in our qualitative and quantitative studies as well as the design choices we have made for the app. It provided us with the “do” data to complement the “say” data of the previous research. The core product to be developed needed to include:

• Financial management of projects that include project costs and return on investment over time.
• Project management dashboard to track projects
• DIY educational support from trusted sources like Lowe’s

The results of our research, design, and in-market testing resulted in an MVP app that will focus on the 3 value propositions listed above. It is currently in development and is scheduled to launch in the spring of 2021.

One of the main lessons learned from this project is to test early and test often. The in-market tests were crucial in what people will gravitate towards to meet their needs. We did that later in the product design cycle and doing it after the generative research and initial wireframes would have helped with speeding up decision making on the user flow and experience.