House2Home
Your Online Home Décor Store!
Find products for any space, on any budget with confidence.
A “starter kit” of items curated by professional interior designers that match users' unique design styles and budgets, allowing them to confidently decorate their new living space.
Solution
Based on the responses from 10 user interviews on the shopping experience, I discovered that users had difficulties purchasing multiple home decor items together, felt overwhelmed by online choices, and required fast and budget-friendly assistance in finding suitable items for their new home or apartment.
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"How might we increase users' confidence in buying multiple home decor items together to personalize their new place?
Mapping end-to-end user experience:
Some of the questions, I was trying to have answered were:
The H2H website includes two major user flows:
I reviewed existing competitors to gather inspiration and identify potential opportunities for my design to create an effective H2H experience for my users.
Flow:1
1. User visits the website to purchase home décor items for their new house.
2. Takes a style quiz to determine their décor style.
3. Look through the suggested starter kit of items based on their style & make a selection.
4. User can either add the selected items to the cart & process to checkout or save the items for later.
The second flow would be for the user who needs expert help decorating their space with confidence because psychology says you tend to enjoy the things you choose with confidence.
1. After getting style quiz results, the user chose the free interior designer service.
2. Once matched with a designer based on their style & budget preferences.
3. Designer connects with the user with some unique design ideas & inspiration.
4. User can either add the curated list of items to the cart & process to checkout or ask for more styling inspiration from the designer.
I chose to add an interactive quiz to provide a shortcut for users to discover & purchase the right products without doing extensive research, boosting confidence and saving time.
The Crazy 8's
For the purpose of this sprint challenge, I decided to go with the first user map — a style quiz and shop designer-curated looks. Then I spent 8 minutes brainstorming and sketching out 8 unique ideas for my flow, with a focus on creating an exceptional user experience.
I chose the style quiz screen as the most critical step, as quizzes are personal and interactive. They can improve your shopper’s purchase decision confidence and trust, ultimately turning them into loyal customers.
Day 2: Lightning Demos & Sketching out possible solutions
Day 1: Understanding the Problem
Project Learnings
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Working with constraints. Creating a strong design solution for a specific problem within a limited time frame can be challenging. However, being open to experimentation, refining, and iterating on ideas based on user and mentor feedback helped me to work within constraints.
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Parallel vs linear. At first, I focused on creating a happy, linear path for users to follow. However, feedback from my mentor and users highlighted the importance of offering parallel paths for shoppers to discover products quickly. As a designer, I should provide a streamlined and efficient shopping experience that caters to the needs and preferences of my users.
The lack of confidence to purchase multiple decor items is causing decreased sales and customer satisfaction.
Through customer surveys, House2Home (H2H) had found that many of their customers have just moved into a new home or apartment and want to buy multiple items to personalize their new empty place- but they don’t feel confident doing it on their own.
Problem
Timeline
7 Days Design Sprint
Tools
Miro, Figma
My Role
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User Research- Competitive Analysis
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UX Design- Crazy 8s, How Might We, Wireframing, Prototyping
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UI Design & Usability Testing
As part of my springboard BootCamp program, students were assigned to individually work on Google Ventures (GV) design sprint on a given problem statement and develop a design solution.
I chose to work on the House2Home design challenge, an e-commerce website “House2Home” is a new startup that sells small home décor items and accessories.
My Process: I followed the five-day Design Sprint framework.
I expanded on my solution sketches by creating a storyboard to map out the user journey and decide on features and functionality for the final prototype. After reviewing my storyboard with my mentor, I refined the user flow based on his feedback and moved on to prototyping with a stronger solution.
Day 3: Storyboard to visualize and communicate ideas effectively
Then I started building a prototype based on the storyboard and design decisions I made on day 3 to test with users. My objective was to develop a prototype that was quick but close to the real product to enable users to engage better with it and provide meaningful feedback.
The home screen provides two user flow options- explore design ideas made by professional designers or get personalized style help from a designer.
Design style quiz to show personalized design options based on user's choices.
Starter kit by a selected interior designer for users to quickly shop items.
Product page to view details about the selected item before adding it to shopping cart.
Day 4: Prototyping the solution
On day 5 of the design sprint, I conducted usability testing sessions with five users, both in person and online. My objective was to gather feedback on the prototype and refine it further based on their input. Overall, the feedback was positive, and I identified a few areas where I could make UI changes to improve the user experience:
1. Some users found the design service tab on the navigation bar to be a bit repetitive. To address this, I decided to replace it with home tour options. This would enable users to view different designed homes by professional designers, making it easier for them to visualize the possibilities and get inspired.
2. Users really liked the progress bar on the style quiz page as it provided real-time feedback when they selected different options, it helped them understand their progress and stay engaged.
Overall, I used the feedback from the usability testing sessions to make small but significant improvements to the prototype, with the goal of enhancing the user experience and making it more intuitive and engaging.
Day 5: Usability testing & design iterations