Description: I balanced the needs of homeowners and contractors to create a simple tool for generating home renovation quotations.
Project Duration: 3 months
My Role: Research, design
Tools Used: Figma
At Billdr, we are reinventing the way renovations are done by guiding homeowners from start to finish and building tools to help general contractors be more efficient during throughout the home renovation process.
General contractors lack of efficiency during the bidding phase of a renovation project. In turn, homeowners want to feel secure in their decision when choosing the correct contractor on projects that are personal and at times quite expensive!
A semi-automated quotation processwith pre-populated tasks that provides efficiency to contractors andtransparency to homeowners.
I interviewed eight homeowners who have had some degree of experience with renovation projects. I first used a screener survey to make sure they had the kind of experience that I wanted and then followed up to set up an appointment.I also spoke with four contractors and also interviewed two of our Operations staff since they work with contractors on a day to day basis.
Generally, homeowners don’t like renovation projects and they have low trust for contractors.
Contractors are busy and don’t want to waste their time on administrative tasks. It takes up time they could use towards projects that generate revenue.
The degree to which contractors break down quotes varies greatly on their customer service philosophy.
Homeowners experienced many negative emotions when it came to communicating and coordinating with contractors.
From my user research, I created proto personas that would communicate the needs of the contractors and homeowners. I presented these findings to the team including staff from Operations, a Developer, and of course other UX designer.
The user research helped me focus the UX team on the goal of creating a quotation process that:
Below you’ll see the first iteration of the quotation feature. We designed it to offer some degree of specificity in the quotation but not too much that would burden contractors given that the tendency to break down a quote depends on the contractor.
To test our first iteration, I sought to test how quickly and efficiently contractors were able to complete the quote and add tasks. I tested with four contractors over Zoom.
These findings prompted us to further refine the “add task” flow since that is where users seemed to get stuck…
Below you can see the full new flow of the new version with the changes applied. This includes the addition of the first screen indicating that the quote would be pre-filled. This would highlight this helpful feature to contractors so that users will understand benefit fromBilldr’s app.
To cut down the amount of time it takes to complete the task, we simplified this process in the second iteration by:
After we made changes based on the first user testing, we sent the app to the developers. Once the app was built, the CPO tested the product in Montreal. I was unable to be there since it required in-person testing. Six contractors were recruited and participated in the in-person testing.
Thanks to the changes, the six contractors who participated in user testing successfully added and edited a task to the quotation feature! Our changes addressed the design issues. Below you’ll see that all six contractors who participated in the final user testing successfully added a task.
