House2Home

The Problem

A starter kit on their homepage with different interior styles of decor items.

House2Home allows users to quickly decorate their new spaces within their budget and preference of style. Finding decor items that work together and fit one’s taste is easier with House2Home’s starter kits.

House2Home is a recent startup that sells home decor items. They’ve been noticing that the majority of their users have recently moved into a new place and want to quickly decorate. House2Home is looking for a solution to help guide users who have recently moved into a new place with a starter kit of decor items to their liking.

MY APPROACH

Day 1: Understand + Map

Day 2: Lightning Demos, Crazy 8’s, Solution Sketch

Day 3: Decision Making + Storyboard

Day 4: Prototype Solution

Day 5: Validate

DAY 1: Understand + Map end-to-end user experience

House2Home provided the research, user interviews, and persona to me. After reviewing and assessing the information I synthesize the findings. From the information I learned that users needed help in achieving the “look” they desire for their new home. They want to find the right decor items that look good in their place but also aren't too expensive. They want a similar look to their inspo, is budget-friendly, and can work in their spaces.

DAY 2: Lightning Demos, Crazy 8’s, Solution Sketch

DAY 3: Decision Making + Storyboard

DAY 4: Prototype

DAY 5: Validate

The second day consisted of conducting modified lightning demos. This looked like quickly researching competitor products trying to solve similar problems to what House2Home was trying to solve.

Since I was working solo on this design sprint, I went ahead with my solution sketch and proceeded to create 8 more panel storyboards to act as a wireframe when building out the prototype for the next day.

With less than a day to prototype the product, I knew I had to work fast and focus on making it as realistic as possible but at the same time not get too fixated on fleshing everything out.

Due to the time restraint of the sprint, the end-to-end experience was kept short. I created a narrated task that involved a user scenario and the goal was to see how the users would interact with the product with this knowledge.

In the interviews, every user voiced that having the starter kit button on the landing page with the copy “Just Moved In?” helped them quickly make the decision to shop the starter kit. Another important finding was that the filter toggle was super helpful because every one of the participants utilized it to search for products within the budget range, but they also voiced for more filter options to find specific products within the kit.

Many users enjoyed being able to choose different styles for the starter kits and one user voiced that it would be nice to have some descriptive info about each style since he wasn’t knowledgeable about interior styles. Every one of them enjoyed the UI and simple flow of the product. Overall, I learned to keep in mind that when users have a feature, they want to be able to access the full capacity of the feature.

Potential end-to-end user experience

After synthesizing the research, I did some local outreach to recruit 5 participants for Day 5 to interact and test the final product.

Competitors: Havenly + Ikea

The Solution

Based on this research and the map I created on Day 1, I did a Crazy 8’s exercise to rapidly sketch out 8 ideas and potential solutions in 8 minutes. I sketched out different renditions of a potential critical screen—the starter kit page of decor items.

At the end of the Crazy 8’s exercise, I chose one of the screen sketches that I thought would best fit my critical screen design. From there, I sketched out a 3-panel board solution sketch for the critical screen sequence.

View the full working prototype here

Reflection

This design sprint flew by so fast, it challenged me to be quick on my feet and let the ideas flow out of me (good or bad ideas). Through this modified GV sprint, I learned that good things can come out of a short time and that its not about getting things done perfect but rather getting things done.

If I had more time, I would gather more user research and conduct another round of usability testing to reiterate and validate my designs.