My Role: Project Manager, Research, Sketching, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Testing
Timeline: 4 sprints over 5 weeks
Team: 4 designers
Platform: Mobile
Software Used: Figma (Wireframing), InVision (Prototyping)
The Challenge
Between March 30th and May 1st 2020, a team of myself and three other designers was tasked with creating a Millennial-focused entry into the home services industry, an industry worth 600 billion dollars and only growing. The correlation makes sense, since within the next five years millennials will make up nearly 75% of the job market, and 73% say they’re working more than forty hours a week. Basically: they don’t really have time to fix their sink. On top of that, they’re the most educated generation in the United State’s history, yet individual earnings for young workers have remained flat for fifty years. 91% of them claim to have a healthy relationship with technology, yet 53% wake up in the night to check their phone.
Millennials make up a generation of juxtapositions: it’s difficult to hold down what they want. But according to the Harris Group, amongst all the noise of climate change, economic recession, tech dependency, 72% of millennials want experiences over possessions. They want connections, something real, a story to tell, person-to-person moments. Our challenge was to create an on-demand home services product for these people: one that respects their time and their desire for something genuine.
The Approach
Beginning this process, the team met and discussed our assumptions about millennials and the home services landscape. These would eventually be challenged by research. They included:
Millennials will use on-demand home service applications because they lack DIY knowledge.
They’re time-poor, and depending on their age cash-poor, yet they will prioritize time looking for those “experiences” and aim for every step of the process to be as time efficient as possible
A social element is wanted, due to the prevalence of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. amongst the demographic
This product will be used on their smartphone, and/or a home computer
Initially we believed Millennials would want a product that would help in building out their DIY skills, and the time being saved would be in the long-run when they wouldn’t have to hire anyone to complete their tasks. We envisioned a database of short videos, made by industry professionals, that would run the gamut of how to rewire a light switch, to how to properly fold laundry.
However, our research quickly dispelled this as an option (time, lack of resources, competition in Youtube, see Discoveries for more), but surveys and interviews brought something else to light, that our user base prioritizes recommendations from their trusted sources (friends, family) above all.
This lead us to building this problem statement:
Time strapped millennials need a way to source recommendations for trusted home service professionals from their peer-based network so that they can have multiple tasks done efficiently & professionally.
Discoveries
Competitive Analysis
Our first finding was immediate: the market is crowded. There’s tens of thousands of home service apps available for Android and iOS, anything in or around your house has a dozen apps for it, and some do it all, like Handy or Taskrabbit. It seemed like every home service was covered, that was except teaching individuals how to do any of this. None of these products provided any assistance is improving one’s DIY skillset, and we kept that in mind when approaching our User Interviews.
Additionally, we found that the apps with the most market share:
Valued simplicity, and attempted to offer the least amount of steps to reach solutions
Offered the widest variety of services, striving to be “all-in-one”
Implement a “vetting” system for their professionals, whether it be validating their license or checking resume/references
Only offer professional solutions
Once we completed this exploratory research, we looked into drafting a survey.
Initial Survey
We wrote a twenty-one question survey that was completed by 60 participants over a six day period. The goals of the survey were to identify:
A key demographic
What users define as a “home service”
Why they use a “home service”
Potential frustrations
Social/communication behaviors of potential users
What platforms users use
Notable findings included:
A less notable finding was 55% of the participants wanted to complete their own tasks, but stated they didn’t have the necessary skills, contrasted with the nearly as big 45% that would pay whatever amount to just get the job done.
User Interviews
The team sought out individuals that were between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-eight who were city-dwellers, comfortable with technology, and value convenience. We talked with a range of people who had used and enjoyed home service apps, used and disliked, or even some people who completed all their own tasks. Millennials are a diverse demographic, and we wanted to find the common ground between them. We garnered three main insights from these interviews:
Users value trusted recommendations from peers and inner circles before looking online.
“I pretty much only hire people that my friends recommend. My cousin's a plumber and one of my good friends is an electrician so I would ask them first and if they weren't available I would ask them to recommend someone.”
This lines up with our survey data, but I was interested if it had any crossover with the 94% who said they value online reviews. I believed more research was necessary to understand the hierarchy of these opinions. What sways our users: a select number of friends, or millions of strangers online?
Users value time over money and would rather have tasks done efficiently.
“In the end, there’s no time to take 10 hours to learn something, especially if it takes someone who knows what they're doing 3-4 hours to do it.”
As I heard that participant say this in our interview, I wondered what that meant for our assumptions. This participant in particular was making less than 50k a year, which is more than what a majority of our survey base stated they were making. Despite being cash-poor, this person valued those six or seven hours they would save more than money, and this lines up with all of our participants despite their experience or financial situation. Our users didn’t have the time to learn.
Both users that rent and own a home value and foster pre-existing relationships with service providers.
“I recommended contacting the people who we had worked with previously for snow removal because they do overall building contracting too. And they're actually right around the corner.”
This is the finding that set us down the road we stuck to. This encompasses the real human experiences Millennials are looking for, but also factors in their time. They can save time looking for new providers once they have some they trust and can return to.
An affinity diagram made to pull insights from our interview data.
Secondary Survey
This was a five question survey we felt compelled to administer to validate the findings in our user interviews. Some data had small conflicts with our primary survey, so we felt like we should zero in on the problem points.
Of our respondents, 70% said the first step they would take to hire a home service professional would be to ask a peer, affirming our beliefs. Moving forward from there, 79% of those individuals said they would not get the same quality provider from the internet as they would from a friend’s recommendation.
Solution
Our solution is Three Degrees, an app made to streamline the peer recommendation process.
The splash screen.
A short onboarding informs the user how it works...
...
...
The inner circle's recommended service providers populate the home screen...
... and users begin to build their "inner circle" using their choice of phone contacts or social media.
Filters and searches can help the user zero in on a professional right for them.
Afterwards, the user can message the service provider...
... or look through their calendar to see if their availability matches up with theirs.
Three Degrees gives millennials a needed and invaluable asset in the home services world: community. Users can source any kind of service provider from who they trust the most, and if that comes up short, then they can look into the friends of their friends. It addresses user’s frustrations with the overwhelming amount of unsubstantiated information in the industry by distilling that to just their trusted support group’s opinions.
The concept was created after the team conducted mind-mapping and 6-8-5 sketching exercises.
We began by asking ourselves to reimagine recommendation systems for users to find on-demand home services, and assessing that through various lenses. E.g., the inspiration, or why, in reimagining how users find on-demand home services could be the recent onslaught of unreliable information online, or “fake news”. Who knows if that contractor is actually any good?
From here, each of us took five minutes to pull ideas from the mind map to sketch them, resulting in images like:
As a team we discussed these, and pulled the ideas “live video feed”, “social circles”, “provider validation”, “ratings system”, and others to start ideating further, but eventually some concepts fell by the wayside in favor of something more achievable in our time frame.
Three Degrees was pursued because we believed it answered our problem statement the best, and therefore would benefit the users the most. This would be addressed in usability testing.
Outcomes
Through usability testing, we discovered some insights to keep in mind moving forward:
In general users like sourcing recommendations from their friends and peers in order to hire contractors.
Users thought the onboarding process was informative and gave a good idea of what the app was about.
Users gravitate to the search function, because it’s familiar.
Overall, the app is easy to use and intuitive.
“I think it's a clean design, super simple, so there's not too much being thrown at you, like I don't feel like I'm being advertised to. This seems like a very good, simple and clean brand to me; it tells you exactly the intention.”
“I like it because it's simple and gets to the point. There’re not extra options where you don't have to go look for the information - it’s all in one app.”
“I'd get this app because I have a purpose, and it's fulfilling that purpose quickly & easily.”
A moment from remote usability testing.
Looking Ahead
The prototype and wireframes only looked at the “first degree”, close friends, and it’s integral to investigate the other degrees: friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends.
The challenge will be balancing two things: providing as many avenues to find service providers to users as possible, and maintaining a streamlined, easy-to-use application. If you had ten friends, and each of your friends had ten friends (none in common), the second degree would be a hundred people, which right now seems pretty unmanageable. The challenge will be to make this data easy to search.
We wanted to design an app for busy people to stay busy, while getting their projects completed with a piece of mind. That meant that beginning from the impression that users would come into this experience with a pre-existing social network that could make finding peer recommended quality providers a personalized experience.
If they didn’t have a network connecting them to trusted providers, how would they benefit from using the app? More research is needed to see where users like this would turn to, but our current assumptions would be the search feature, the app just wouldn’t be very different than any other app on the market.
Mentioned previously, the app could/should be expanded to include different types of service providers, ranging from trades to hobbyists.
The potential for this app is nearly limitless, possibly allowing your friends to recommend you to someone to do your laundry, or someone to paint your portrait. The sky's the limit.
With all this being said, there’s still a whole other half to the app the team hasn’t touched: the contractor side. If anything is researched it should be this.
We have not conducted any research into this, but the current assumption would be that it would function nearly identically to the current form. Service providers would have their client circles, and they would have a circle for their recommended service providers. There should also be a validation / credibility / license-approval system, to ensure service providers are legitimate. Without this side, there’s no app.