Improving Homeowner Communication
Mobile App Redesign
BuilderComs is a startup based out of North Carolina that has created a platform that solves one of the largest challenges in the construction industry - communication breakdowns between contractors and homeowners.
Our UX team worked with the CEO to design the next version of BuilderComs’ mobile app to provide a seamless user experience for homeowners, a group critical for the company’s future growth.
My Role: UX Researcher/Designer + Lead Client Liaison
Duration: 3 Weeks Sprint (Jan 2024)
Tools: Figma, Maze, Notion, Keynote, Zeplin
Methods Used: User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Competitive Feature Analysis, Business Model Canvas, Feature Prioritization, Heuristic Evaluation, Mobile Prototyping, Usability Testing, Task Flows, Sketching & Design Studio
WHat we set out to accomplish
The BuilderComs team identified homeowners as an audience that is critical to future growth, however they didn’t know much about the challenges or goals of this group, so we conducted extensive research with the goal of delivering a redesigned mobile app that will provide a delightful homeowner experience.
Project Goals:
Increase usability of app
Understand goals, challenges, pain points of target audience - homeowners
Develop new homeowner-focused features
Design Opportunity:
Modernize visual design
Tailor app to support homeowner user experience
Remove navigation challenges
new and improved mobile app
We worked to deliver a redesign proposal that enhanced the existing value of the app through developing new features such as:
Visibility into project timelines
Intuitive organization for messaging
Single repository to store project documentation
Streamlined user experience
After testing the existing app and our proposed redesign we saw improvements in the average success rate, decrease in the time on task, and an increase in the overall easiness rating. These results validated the design changes we made to streamline the user experience.
design Process
My team and I helped homeowners communicate more effectively with their contractor team, manage documentation, and gain visibility into their remodels with the BuilderComs app.
How did we accomplish this? By following the design process below:
learning about communication challenges
Goal of research
Our team set out to learn more about the problem space of homeowner and contractor communication and to validate our hypothesis that homeowners have a challenging time communicating with their contractors, resulting in unsatisfactory experiences and delays.
Business Research
Competitive Feature Analysis
We chose companies and features that prioritized communication, mainly in the construction industry. This allowed us to visualize how similar companies operate and if there were any feature gaps. Features potentially valuable based on BuilderComs offering:
Business Model Canvas
To supplement the information we received from our stakeholder interview with BuilderComs CEO, Ron Nussbaum, our team created a business model canvas to get a deeper understanding of how BuilderComs operated and where the company sat in the broader marketplace.
What we heard from homeowners
Completed six user interviews
Homeowners who had completed a home construction project in the past year
Goal: uncover potential pain points and insights to inform our redesign.
Method: discussion guide with questions to validate or invalidate our assumptions.
Synthesis
We used affinity mapping to synthesize user data from interviews. We noted observations from each user, then grouped the insights by similarity to extract common themes, which we used to understand the homeowner’s goals, needs, and pain points.
Who are we designing for?
Persona
We created a persona - “Lisa Homeowner” to gain a visual understanding of our target audience. Based on the insights and direct quotes from our user interviews, we outlined our persona's goals, needs, and pain points, in order to focus our design efforts on ultimately solving the users's challenges.
Journey Map
We also created a journey map, which tracks the highs & lows of our persona as they go through a remodel. This allowed our team to put ourselves in Lisa’s shoes and understand where our redesign could have the most impact for our target audience.
evaluating the existing design
Before starting the redesign, we needed to understand what was working well and what could be improved within the existing app. We evaluated the design by conducting five usability tests and a heuristics evaluation. These exercises helped us to identify usability issues, and I’ve highlighted a few below that we focused on solving for in our redesign.
Usability issues identified:
Hesitation on which message category to select for task
Users wanted to click on the entire card to view project info
Confusion with eye icon & additional space within page layout
When finding the invoice, users found it via notifications however users could not exit the page, and had to restart the app to exit.
Applying Research to design
It was critical for our UX team to apply research learnings directly to our redesign, in order to ensure that the product changes solved the challenges homeowners face when communicating with contractors.
Ideating on our design
Our Process
We designed three hi-fi prototypes and conducted two rounds of usability testing to develop our final prototype. Overview of our process below:
Prioritizing Features
To kick off our design and ideation phase, we used two techniques to prioritize features while keeping in mind the constraints of limited resources. These exercises helped us to understand what features were high priority vs. low priority, and what already existed within the app.
Must Have Features
DEVELOPING OUR DESIGN
Our team conducted a design studio session to get our ideas onto paper and collaborate on our design. We referenced our persona, journey map, interview data/quotes, feature prioritization matrix for inspiration when sketching out features.
Key Takeaways:
Keep relevant app language and labeling to align with existing users expectations
Incorporate a timeline view and document storage features based on user interviews
Simplify the homepage to make the design more modern
Testing the redesign with users
Check project Start Date
Message contractor
Insight: Users found it unclear which conversation to select when looking at messages
Feature: Made “general” the default location users were taken within the chat and divided the sections at the top of messaging with a tab bar
Access documents
In order to understand if our design was easy to use, we conducted 2 rounds of usability tests on our V1 and V2 prototypes. Each round had 5 users, for a total of 10 users. Based on the results from each test, we made modifications to the next prototype. The results below are the usability testing deltas from the existing app to our final V3 prototype.
Insight: Users want to click on the whole card to project details
Feature: Fully tappable card with a more simplistic design; users can expand card for more details
Insight: With the existing design, documents were only accessible through the chat, which confused users.
Feature: Access documents through the project details page
Results
Results
Results
Introducing…our final design!
modernizing the visual design
The goal of the style guide was to stay true to the existing brand identity, while making the design more modern and increasing the contrast to meet accessibility standards.
Additional Product Highlights
Progress Details
Insight: Homeowners want to see live updates of their construction project
Feature: Timeline of all progress updates
We developed and designed net-new features within the platform that we felt would enhance the homeowner experience based on what we learned from user research and testing.
File Storage & Organization
Insight: Homeowners want detailed documentation for renovation process
Feature: Shared files from all projects would then live in one place for them to easily access
Implementing the redesign at Buildercoms
Implementation
We delivered a detailed project report, spec doc, Zeplin file, and presentation to the customer to ensure a successful handoff to BuilderComs' developer team. The BuilderComs team plans to roll out the changes in the next 6-9 months.
Our recommendation was a staggered roll out of features in segments. Having an incremental release allows BuilderComs to stay organized by minimizing risk. During these phases, the BuilderComs team can collect any user feedback while also allowing users to acclimate to the changes.
Phase 1 - Add segmented chat to current design, start working on proposed UI design
Phase 2 - Add contractor location sorting within current design
Phase 3 - Continue working on proposed UI design
Phase 4 - Roll out proposed UI design, restructure projects