App Reconstruction: Homebuilder Software

Remodeling a construction software’s mobile app for enhanced user engagement and business growth.

STAKEHOLDERS

BUILDERCOMS OVERVIEW

BuilderComs addresses communication breakdowns between contractors and homeowners with a singular platform for them to communicate on. Contractors subscribe to the web portal, while homeowners use the native mobile app to view projects, request estimates, receive updates, and communicate with their contractor.

In our initial client meeting, we delved into understanding our client's business and crafted a roadmap that resonated with both teams, fostering a shared sense of purpose and alignment on the project’s timeline.

Our client wanted to make the BuilderComs app “sticky” among homeowners so that they would insist that any contractor they work with would need to be on their platform. With that in mind, we agreed on the following objectives:

• Enhance aesthetics

• Integrate supplementary communication channels

Additionally, to draw inspiration for potential features, I led my team through a competitive feature analysis of companies as similar as possible to BuilderComs, which led to the following considerations:

To assess BuilderComs' current usability status, we opted for a Heuristic Evaluation based on the Abbey Method. This method, consisting of 10 principles, allows us to identify common sense issues efficiently, and are outlined here:

• Team comprehension of pain points from standpoint of UX Best Practices

To learn more about our users, we spoke with 6 homeowners over Zoom who had completed work on their property within the last 5 years. Here you will find some notable quotes.

• Preference for a single communication platform

PERSONA

• Humanizes and builds empathy with our target audience

• Provides insight into our users’ needs and potential features 

• Prevents tendency to design for ourselves through serving as a reference point for decisions

Lisa is derived from user interviews, encapsulating the key aspects of our target audience.

• Highlights positive and negative aspects of a user’s experience

• Negatives illuminate opportunities to alleviate stress points 

• Fosters team alignment on our typical user’s experience

Taking it a step further, we developed a user journey map to illustrate the typical path that Lisa would take in renovating her home with a contractor.

Beginning with rough sketches, my team delved into a design studio session, where we drew wireframes of proposed screen designs and gave each other feedback to determine which designs best paralleled with our project requirements.

• Facilitates alignment on design concept

• Rapid Iteration

• Saves time when designing in Figma

We collaborated to create a testing guide with an introduction script and three tasks per scenario. Five participants completed the tasks, and we recorded observations based on the following rating criteria:

“You are getting ready to start a remodel process. Find your current remodel and check when it will start.”

TASK EXAMPLE

• Quantitative data to support design decisions

Feedback from testing observations and participant input was crucial and shaped our designs. Every prototype version was given a name that the team could use as a reference point when communicating changes between testing rounds. The following formula was repeated three times until our design was finalized:

• Decisions are user driven

After finalizing our redesign, our team presented our work to our client and other relevant stakeholders. Our revamped product integrated all of our client’s business requirements, as well as other recommendations to make BuilderComs a “must have” for any homeowner engaging a contractor for work on their home.

• Enhanced Aesthetics

• Improved Navigation

• Search/Filters

All stakeholders were involved in determining actionable KPI’s that could be used to measure our product’s success. Being that this is a native, task specific app, we determined that the best metrics to ascertain the product’s velocity at GTM would be:

• System Usability Scale (SUS) Rating of 80+

• Critical Thinking: A technique that may have benefitted us in our research phase would have been to redirect questions back to our interview subjects and get them to think critically. This could also have been done by using a technique like the $100 test, and would have aided us in feature prioritization.

Alongside the outlined changes, we propose additional developments for BuilderComs. These include implementing empty states for message categories (General, Sales, Scheduling, Service) to provide context for first-time users, as well as an error message screen.

• Interview Direction: Even though all of our interviews provided valuable insights, we sometimes allowed the conversation to flow a little too freely. We could have benefitted from bringing the interview back to our specific line of questioning more often to ensure quality insights.

LESSONS LEARNED

• Client Involvement: While we were fortunate enough to have a client who gave us broad leeway and trusted our judgement, looking back it would have been beneficial to display a sample of our work to ensure that we were on the right track.