House2Home
A decorating solution for new home renters/owners
Background
House2Home is an e-commerce website that focuses on helping individuals decorate spaces with items such as prints, posters, lighting, and minor accent pieces and accessories.
Most customers have moved into a new apartment or house. House2Home wants to help these users with a “starter kit” of items to decorate their new apartment or home efficiently.
Timeframe
October 2022- Modified GDV Sprint
Role
UX and UI Designer
Problem
When people move into a new space, decorating can be overwhelming. Finding affordable decorations within their unique space can be challenging, even if someone knows their style.
Searching on different sites for various items that fit the same style can take time and is not a desirable process for someone moving to a new space and wanting to decorate as quickly as possible.
Solution
My solution to this problem involved improving the shopping process for home decor for new spaces by creating a simple way for users to customize a design package based on their needs.
During this five-day design sprint, I prototyped a solution allowing users to quickly and easily create a design decor package for their new space based on their budget, style, and space preferences.
How might we create interior-decor packages easily customizable by style, space, and budget?
Day One: Mapping Solutions
Synthesizing Research
As I dove into research, I sought to explore the problem space. House2Home had already conducted user research through user interviews and recorded an interview with a participant.
The highest priorities of the users are staying within budget while shopping for their apartment decorations and having an easy and quick way to find items that fit with the aesthetic they are trying to achieve.
The users prioritize finding quality items with affordable prices that will work with their spaces and general style preferences. A secondary concern is ensuring things look good within their space before purchasing.
I mapped out several user journeys for the House2Home site, which helped me visualize how to accomplish the end goal of the experience: to find and purchase a decor kit based on their needs and preferences.
I selected my most direct user journey to allow for minimal steps from beginning to end, with the user inputting their preferences early to provide tailored results but with the option to easily customize these results before purchase.
Day Two: Sketch
Lightning Demos
Sketching
I began Day 2 with a solo round of lightning demos to investigate existing interior decor solutions for people moving into new homes.
While exploring these sites, I focused on the persona’s goal of quickly finding items that fit the user's budget and style preferences in the least amount of steps to reduce the feeling of confusion.
I studied two widely-used decor sites, Havenly and SpaceJoy, and Stitch Fix, a personal-style subscription service.
Spacejoy
Interior design service that connects users with an interior designer.
Provides a “style quiz,” which allows users to define their style preferences.
Three main packages based on budget, and once users select a package, customizable.
Stitchfix
Provides users with a personal styling service for fashion instead of interior design.
Similar solution for providing users with a curated package based on budget and style preferences that they can edit and modify.
Stitch Fix also allows users to try and return items and schedule how often they would like to purchase curated items.
Havenly
Service that allows users to select an interior designer, and work with the designer to achieve their goals for designing their space.
The designer provides the user with suggestions, and the user then picks which ideas they like and proceeds to purchase.
When sketching, I focused on the initial steps where users will provide information about their preferences and budget.
My goal was to reduce the number of screens for the user to enter the necessary information to get results. I considered the persona's main goals when thinking about the most vital details the user will need to enter to get the most relevant results for their design package.
Day Three: Decide
On Day 3, I had to nail down the critical functionality of House2Home. The primary purpose was to create a simple process to find, customize, and purchase an interior design package, so I focused most heavily on deciding the most vital information to determine the design package the customer would want.
I wanted to ensure that the users would only have to enter a little information to get an initial result and that they could easily modify the selections by adding or subtracting items. I wanted to reduce the number of choices the user would make, allowing for an effortless shopping process.
Therefore, I chose to focus on the initial preference selection screen, the suggested packages, and the details about the design package. The sketches above highlight the critical screen (the preferences selection), the initial home screen, and the recommended design packages).
When creating my storyboard, I utilized the “quiz” or selecting preferences model, similar to Stitch Fix and Havenly.
Still, my focus was to make the process shorter while remaining comprehensive. I achieved this by reducing the number of screens and combining all aspects of the preference selections with being on the same screen.
Although this may limit the options for individuality within design packages, allowing users to customize the package in the following screen provides users with maximum flexibility and control.
Day Four: Prototype
I used Figma to create a lightweight design prototype. I could determine how to select items within different style packages by including images of rooms with cohesive styles. I focused on using minimal color and white space to effectively highlight the rooms and products' images.
Day Five: Validate
Usability Testing
I interviewed 5 participants via Zoom to determine if the primary function of my design (providing a way for users to easily access a customized design package based on their preferences and budget) is practical.
Each participant had relatively recent (within the last 1-3 years) experiences moving to a new apartment or home. Most had used some service for at least gaining inspiration for their decor style, primarily Pinterest.
4/5 participants found selecting their preferences and budget to be easy and that all 5 participants could complete the provided scenario efficiently.
However, I also received some feedback about my prototype's simplicity. I left out details within my initial prototype that would help create an optimal user experience, primarily related to browsing and customizing the suggested design package.
House2Home Prototype
Recommendations and Future Iterations
To resolve the issues with the selection of style preferences, I redesigned the thumbs up/thumbs down element within the prototype for increased clarity and understandability. This was an essential step within the user journey, so I had to ensure the user could complete it and progress to the next process step.
To address the lack of clarity around browsing to find additional related items, I redesigned the bottom section of the design package screen to show additional images of suggested items that the user could add to their design package. This increased emphasis on this area and made it obvious that users can modify and add items to the design package if they desire to.
Lessons Learned
As this was my first attempt at a GDV sprint, I found the process challenging as a solo designer. Focusing on simplicity helped me reduce scope creep and stay on track with my singular goal for the sprint.
Research showed that a secondary concern for users was the desire to make sure the items they wanted to purchase would fit within their specific space, so I also considered creating a VR feature to fulfill this need.
In the future, I would also spend additional time solidifying the site's information architecture to allow users to browse different packages and items quickly.
The resulting solution for the sprint was simple and effective in its simplicity. In a future sprint, I would consider testing a second prototype centered around a function for users to browse all available packages initially on the home screen.