Reimagining Home Furnishing Experience
UX Intern ✴ Winter 2023
Context
Currently, clients with home projects must engage with multiple professionals from various fields, including architects, interior designers, painter and builders, to accomplish the project. this process can be cumbersome and inefficient due to the necessity of liasing with several professionals.
The OSST platform introduces a convenient in-app messaging service and incorporates a business directory, where customers can discover skilled architects, interior designers, tradesmen, handyman and more.
As a design intern on the team, I designed the messaging interface and collaborated with other designers on 3 other features of the app. Over the course of 3 months, I worked alongside a product owner, three other junior designers, and received guidance from a senior designer.
Scroll to see the process ↓
Questions that we started with
1. How might we connect customers with businesses?
2. How might we find a way for customers to see services/ professional profiles all at once and to locate the service they want?
3. How might we create a review system for feedback and ratings?
Competitive Analysis
I did competitive analysis on existing home furnishing services and their mobile apps as well. Listing down their advantages and gaps that we can fill, we found the the potential to differentiate ourselves by enabling users to seamlessly and simultaneously engage with multiple professionals and services.
Research
I conducted 8 user interviews to hear their thoughts on home furnishing/renovating projects. This is what they said:
1.“It is kinda annoying that I would have to contact multiple businesses and studios…”
2. “I wish to see the prices for services immediately, but it is often hard to see…”
3. “…exploring different options can be time-consuming”
Narrowing down the goal
Ideation
Usability Testing
10 users, KPI: Usability Score on a scale of 1-10
Although we had some heuristics to help in directing our decision making process, we knew we needed to do testing with actual users to prove our hypotheses.
To see whether the flow of user experience is intuitive for the users, we instructed participants to complete a set of tasks and requested them to assign a usability score to each option for every function/step.
✴ KPI: Key Performance Indicator (Quantitative)
Based on the research results, I built the wireframes for the messaging function.
Test Results
The participants pointed out that the 1. message/calling icon wasn’t the most intuitive while using 2. The sizes of the buttons can be adjusted to make it easier for clicking
Based on the results, I further made changes to the messaging function.
Learnings
From the design and technical perspective, I got to learn more about iOS native and mobile interaction patterns. And I also got to learn more about accessibility from the team.
I also learned the importance of designing less for more. While I tried to stack components on a single card, testing proved that the experience is better when it’s simple. This experience tells me that design is more about targeting the right problem and to be straight forward about the solutions.