Home renovation tool design

4 min readDec 17, 2018

Starting a home renovation project/plan for the first time can be daunting, especially when you know the outcome you want to achieve but aren’t entirely sure where to start or exactly what to look for. Reni wanted to solve this by acting as a bespoke guidebook for customers who want to understand or get involved in home renovations.

I took this project on as a Product Designer with Airbyte, a shnazzy collective of computer scientists. It was a tight deadline however we aimed to get as much user research done to make sure it was a useful tool.

Where did I start

I asked questions, lots and lots of questions. This is probably the most important point in a client to designer relationship, establish an understanding, reinstate their brief and even challenge it.

Even with amazing ideas clients need guidance with their thought process, so I asked questions to identify their brand, market, competitors and even their USP (unique selling point).

Challenge it some more!

To design something effective you need research and not assumptions. At this stage I worked with the client to make a survey to send out to their users.

From this survey we created 3 core personas for the product, meet Lina, Maria and Jon.

We gave each persona a background, value, pain points, likes and dislikes. In our conversations this got rid of a lot of ‘I think our customers would like…’ to ‘according to Lina’s schedule she would most likely…’.

It was not flawless however given the tight deadline it was conducive to ensuring we made efficient and direct decisions.

Establishing the journeys and wireframes

Using that same mindset with the client we created user journeys, tailored for each persona, this was then used as a high-level guide to help prototype the wireframe.

Now for more research!

Once I finished creating the wireframes, the team and I sent out these prototypes linked with different scenarios.

The feedback on features was very positive, but nonetheless we sought to improve. So what we could iterate and test again we did.

Inspiration

From the very start of this project, the client would always reference Airbnb. So the final design of the product was very much inspired by it.

The product

The colour palette mainly consists of peach and navy as they complement each other very well. The client also used the key words ‘airy’ and ‘clean’ so for the typeface I used ‘Avenir Next’, this typeface has a lot of counter space (white space in letters like d and o), which overall suited the brand.