Developing An App For Prefab Homes Buyers — The Design Phase
I was lucky to start my work at Blackbelt Labs, on day one of the design phase — the first stage of actual hands-on app development. I say actual app development because everything preceding it involves many, many conversations to help the client discover what they need. We call these road mapping workshops. Once business objectives are understood and stakeholder needs are identified, it was time to understand the users.
Mapping Their Journey
For this project, we partnered with a prefabricated home company.
They wanted an app that aids mostly first-time homeowners through the house building process. This was a challenging — but exciting — project for our team. Building a home can be a daunting experience just by the sheer size and complexity of the undertaking. However, the palpability of an actual home was irresistible to us since we are used to working with virtual elements in small screens. This was our chance to work with both the tangible and virtual.
But first, how do you build a prefabricated house?
To find out we had to speak to our client’s former clients. We arranged interviews with dozens of homeowners who had gone through this long process and they helped us map it out. From the signing of the contract to the financing to the floor tile and appliance sampling, all the way to the home unveiling. These were some of the steps. But we were also interested in how the future homeowners were feeling throughout the process.
Users Are Emotional
At the interviews we spoke not only about the process but what it felt like to go through it. Our goal was to identify the problems that caused the negative feelings and to come up with features to alleviate them.
We were also interested in the positive feelings to somehow highlight them in the app. For example, a splash screen with words of encouragement or congratulations after completing a particularly difficult stage. Post interviews, we went back to create a customer story that mapped important events and tasks plus feelings and concerns.
Keep It Simple — MVP
From the first round of user feedback, we came up with many features and functions, however, when creating the first iteration on an app all we needed was an MVP — minimal viable product. But why just minimal? Because our list of seemingly useful features were just assumptions based on user’s feelings, concerns and suggestions. The only way to validate those is to actually test them with real users later on in the process.
Content First Design, or Lack Thereof
We engaged an experienced designer and provided him with our User Journey Map annotated with emotions through the use of Emojis.
The map also included the features and desired functions of our MVP. However, the designer, like us, needed more.
The concepts were strong but the content was missing on the client’s side.
We didn’t have enough details about what exactly would go in the app.
For example, one feature was checklists.
The year-long process was divided into stages and within each stage, there were certain tasks that had to be completed. The homebuyers said a checklist for the task would have helped them execute especially when it came to the tasks that required that some documents were printed and signed. Even though we knew the stages, we didn’t know the tasks nor the documents necessary.
During this stage, I realized the importance of Content First Design — or the idea that in order to design effectively the designer must know the context and content well. Without it, the design process took much longer and required more revisions as content details came in and we had to solve again for sizing, colors, margins, layouts, etc.
Click Dummy
Time constraint forced us to work without content to start, but we eventually received full content details and were ready to demo our click dummy to users. We got a great response, and from the feedback, we made some adjustments to the UX and validated them with users again.
Next phase of production will be the coding, but the user validation does not end there. The next set of features would go through the same process: research, assumptions, design based on content, and user validation.
The importance of iterating on a controlled set of features to start (MVP) through user feedback was, for me, the biggest takeaway.
When you begin to design your product remember to keep the first iteration simple, to design around content and to validate all your feature and design assumptions with the homeowners.
