UX Design Process: Retrospective

Designing a DIY feature for The Home Depot app

Ori Statlender
Jul 24, 2017 · 7 min read

I’m sure you are familiar with the saying, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” With the growing number of people wanting to do things themselves, there are opportunities for companies like The Home Depot to provide resources to their customers to help them do home improvement projects themselves.

For this project, my UX team and I were asked to design a tool that would help Home Depot customers brainstorm, plan, track, and even document their Do It Yourself (DIY) projects.

Let me take you through our process of how we came up with the screens below. It all started with some research.

1. Research

Competitive Analysis:

To kick-start our research, we looked into Home Depot and its main competitors to see how, if at all, they incorporated DIY resources on their websites or apps. We found that Home Depot and Lowe’s both have a decent archive of DIY tutorials and tools available on their websites, but very little to no DIY resources on their mobile apps. This came as a shock to me considering the increase in mobile ownership and usage by millennials in the past few years. A 2016 survey by PEW Research Center found that 92% of 18- to 29-year-olds own a smartphone. I would have assumed that a company as large as The Home Depot would include those DIY resources on their mobile app as well.

We also looked into some of Home Depot’s indirect competitors in the DIY space — DIYZ and Pinterest. We found that the DIYZ app has many video tutorials and an easy transition to their shopping pages, and Pinterest has some useful features like the ability to give project feedback, as well as, social sharing and written tutorials. So how and why should Home Depot compete with these companies? That is exactly what we looked to find out.

User Research:

We took a trip to our local Home Depot to interview customers and employees to see what they had to say about their app and DIY projects. Our findings suggested that majority of these customers were proficient or experts in the field of home improvement. It occurred to us that we should be targeting beginner to intermediate level DIYers because these are the types of people that would require more guidance on their projects.

In order to find people to interview that fit that criteria, we created and sent out a screener survey — a survey designed to filter the appropriate audience we were looking for. We were searching for people who have worked on at least one DIY home improvement project in the past year and use online resources to help assist them with their projects. We received 19 responses to our survey and began interviewing. We interviewed 6 of those people. Finally, we followed up with a research survey to reach more people.

2. Insights

Synthesizing Data:

With all the information we gathered, we started to notice the patterns in people’s responses. The following are our findings:

Motivators: “I love the sense of accomplishment after completing a project,” and “I like to save money by doing the project myself.”

Pain Points: “I wish I knew what tools and materials I needed for these projects beforehand,” and “I wish I knew how long the projects would take.”

Online Resources: “I use Google (blogs, tutorials, price comparisons), Pinterest, and Youtube for my projects.”

Planning: “I do a little bit of planning before I start a project — using some of the resources stated above.”

Documenting: “I prefer not to document or share my projects”

Target Users:

Based on this information, we started noting key attributes we want our target users to have. Our target users…

Next, we wanted to put a face and a story to our target users to bring them to life, so we created a persona that fit these characteristics.

Primary Persona:

Meet Eric Wright — a 31 year old Digital Marker from Brooklyn, NY. His friends know him as a ‘Handyman DIYer’ because he loves doing home improvement projects as well as other utilitarian projects. Eric has a strong sense of pride for his work because he grew up helping his father with similar projects. He’s no expert, but he’s no stranger to a jigsaw. Eric constantly looks for guidance with his projects via Google and Youtube.

Throughout the rest of our process, we would constantly refer back to Eric and ask ourselves, “How would Eric feel if he was trying to __________ with our app.” This helped guide a lot of our design directions.

At this point, we knew who we were designing for, but we still needed to figure out what exact problem we were trying to solve.

3. Problem Statement

Our findings suggested that our target users’ main struggles stemmed from planning their projects because they often don’t know what the necessary resources are for a project and where to find them.

“I often end up making more than one trip to the store because the tool I bought the first time wasn’t the right one.”

“I get so annoyed when I buy too few supplies and have to go back to get more.”

After a lot of discussion with my team, we created a problem statement.

DIYers need an easy way to plan and access all resources in one location because it will help them save time and organize their DIY projects more efficiently.

4. Design

You can view our high fidelity prototype below. Keep in mind, it is a prototype and not all functions work.

Now, as awesome as that prototype is, it wasn’t just created out of thin air. So let me explain our design process and how we got to this point.

Preparation:

The first step we took in our design phase was to list out all the features that we believed people would want based on the feedback we received and the competitive analysis. We mapped them out on a chart to understand which features were necessary and required the least amount of effort/expense. Once we decided on the features to incorporate, we created a user flow and then began sketching.

Usability Testing:

From our sketches, we agreed on the best layouts and information hierarchies and we created a paper prototype to being user testing. We went through 3 rounds of user testing. In each test, we presented the tester with 3 real-life scenarios and asked them to explain to us how they think they would approach them. For example, we told testers that their shower head broke and they need to replace it, but they are not sure where to get the supplies, what supplies are needed, and how to physically replace the shower head.

We were mainly testing to see how comfortable people felt with the overall flow and content hierarchy. With each iteration of testing, we received excellent feedback that influenced out design direction. Below, you can see a page of our design and how it evolved from our first paper prototype to a slimmed down design. We noticed all of our testers getting overwhelmed with the design on the left. The looks on their faces screamed out decision paralysis.

We then moved away from paper and started creating mid-fidelity wireframes and presented these to some testers for more feedback. Based on how users reacted, we adjusted the designs into our high-fidelity prototype.

What’s Next:

Since the design process is never really complete, there are some things we would like to explore moving forward.

Documentation

Part of our original task was to include a way for customers to document their projects. However, in our findings, we noticed that our target users prefer not to document or share their projects. We want to interview more people to find out why.

Gamification

For those of you that do not know gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g., point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service. We would like to explore gamification options to help drive more mobile DIY engagement and draw more purchases

Crafty DIYers

Although our target users focus on home improvement projects, we noticed a lot of DIYers that are motivated by the creative aspect of DIY and enjoy doing more arts & craft type projects. We’d like to do more research on this type of user to see how we can incorporate something for them.


Disclaimer: I was not contracted by The Home Depot. This project was strictly educational. Most of the images used on the app screens are images from their website and I do not own the rights to these images.

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