House 2 Home

House 2 Home is a new startup that wants to help people decorate their new homes and apartment

House 2 Home is currently operating as an e-commerce website that sells...

Primary user

Customers that have just moved into a new apartment.

Want

Buy multiple items to personalize their new place

Need

Assistance decorating their new house or apartment

Obstacles

They don't feel confident doing it on their own

Opportunity space

Provide a starter kit of items to instantly decorate their new place

Challenge

Make it easier for people to decorate their new home or apartment by allowing them to purchase multiple products that cater to their style preferences.

My job was to find a solution as fast as possible, and it must be designed for the web.

Day 1 - Map

Starting at the end

The first step on day one was to think about my end goal. What would be the ideal outcome 6-7 months after launch if everything went perfectly?

Goal

All users with a new apartment will be able to successfully decorate their rooms using our website.

Step two was identifying all the potential conflicts that could prevent me from achieving my end goal.

Roadblocks

Starting concept map to achieve the end goal

Asking the experts

The third step was to conduct some quick interviews to gain insight into the subject matter. I took on the role of a note-taker and synthesizer.

“Tell us about a time you shopped for items to decorate your new home or apartment”

Persona

HOW

MIGHT

Day 2 - Sketch

The first step to sketching on day 2 is lightning demos. This is when I looked at examples of great designs to draw inspiration from

My next step was to utilize the 4 step sketching process to generate ideas.

The 1st was to take notes on design details that are thought to be useful from the lightning demos

The 2nd is to draw out some ideas. I generated 3 but slightly different ideas to solve our problem.

The 3rd is all about generating different ways of implementing your idea and how it may look. We call this crazy 8's. 8 sketches. 1-minute max on each sketch.

The 4th and final step was to generate your solution sketch. The grand idea.

Since I was by myself, I provided more than one solution sketch so that I could bring in a panel of judges for the voting process.

Day 3 - Decide

On day 3 it was time to decide on a solution to design and build a prototype.

I brought in 2 other judges that have fresh eyes on the solution sketches and project background.

Each judge including myself was provided with 3 dots to place on their favorite solution. The only rule was you could not place all 3 into one solution.

Now I needed to understand the user's journey to know what screens were most crucial to design and test.

Storyboarding was the key to this step.

I started off by developing the steps to the storyboard. Then sketched and placed the screen where it would lie in the story.

These sketches were used to build a prototype for testing on day 5.

Screens that need to be designed and the relevant point in the story.

Day 4 - Prototype

Building a working prototype as a lone designer in a day was definitely a task. My challenges were creating a layout and finding content to support the design and make it feel real for testing.

Day 5 - Testing

For testing, I utilized the google ventures 5 act interview method to guide me.

My main goal was to:

test the design of the interface (layout)
determine whether or not the task flow was easily understood and that the user knew what was happening.
Get peoples reaction to the uploading photo feature

I learned that my user flow was really simple and my users were often able to say and do without me having to even prompt them.

My users also really enjoyed the 'view in room' feature. This feature provides maximum

impact by allowing people to view and move products around in their own space with augmented reality.

My next steps would be to launch the product and implement user research methods to iterate and continue developing the solution.