House2Home
Meeting User Needs with Starter Bundles
Project Overview
House2Home sells home decoration and accessories such as prints, lighting, small accent pieces, and many more. The startup has noticed that many of their customers have just moved into new apartments or homes and have a desire to decorate. However, these customers either do not know where to start or do not know how to shop for a cohesive theme given their budget constraints.
My role on this project was to design a way to solutionize and address the pain points being experienced by House2Home’s users. As a designer, I created new user interfaces meant for web format and conducted usability tests to validate my proposed solution.
User Pain points
With the research conducted by the company, House2Home found that the most common pain points were not knowing which items to buy to achieve the style they had in mind, not knowing what combination of items to buy within their budget, and not knowing if items will match or go with their space. Overall, customers are looking for a personalized interior designer.
solution Ideation
Given the aforementioned pain points, I decided to go towards the direction of creating starter bundles. Incorporating starter bundles offerings on the website with pre-selected items would eliminate the uncertainty felt by customers when buying decoration and pieces that would match the themes they have in mind.
To get ideas on what other features I can provide or how to organize pages to address customers needs, I looked at other popular e-commerce websites. In my search, I found that websites like Ikea, Target, and Amazon allow users to filter or shop within a certain budget or categories and also offers a feature for shoppers to view items in their space. By adding these features into the website redesign it would allow users to find items within their budget constraints or desired theme and also provide a solution to shoppers not knowing how items would look in their own homes.
Prototyping
Shop Bundles by Theme
The prototype design allowed users to select a desired theme to shop by and allowed them to select a price range which filters out bundles that are out of budget. Customers could then select a bundle of their choice and view the bundle details.
Shop Bundless by price
Customers were also able to search for bundles by price rather than theme. After selecting a budget, customers can also select a theme to filter results. Similar to searching by theme, shoppers were able to view bundle details from this method of searching. In the bundle detail page, customers can add the bundle into their carts. When viewing their carts, shoppers can see their order summary.
View Items in Your Space
The prototype also allowed customers to go through the motion of viewing an item in their room. From the bundle detail page, they can select the View in your Space option which leads to a pop-up window. In this window, customers can upload a photo of their space or do it live with a camera.
Usability Testing Feedback & Insights
All usability testing participants were able to go through the tasks assigned and navigate through the prototype with no issues. While the main functionality of the design worked as planned, participants were able to give feedback and point out possible areas of improvements. When shopping by budget, the increments go from increasing by $50 to increasing by $100 with no option between $100-$200.
During the testing, all participants mentioned color contrast potentially being an issue. However, these were the colors in the current House2Home interface and branding. The website, as shown on the provided material, utilizes a light green color with white text and in my prototype, I used the same color scheme. Changing the branding color palette should be something House2Home can consider for future improvements.
Learns & Future Iterations
Doing a design sprint has given me the experience of designing in a quick and agile manner. Through this project, I was able to learn how to quickly solve problems at hand and allowed me to get a better understanding of how sprints work.
Although the website prototype works as desired with no major usability issues, there were many features that could have enhanced the customer experience which can be incorporated in future iterations. For example, utilizing customer reviews. From a marketing standpoint, customer reviews greatly impact the sales of a product so highlighting and integrating them into the design would be advantageous to the company. Some ways to do so would be allowing customers to filter or sort products by reviews and allowing customers to upload pictures of the items when leaving reviews.
JANE PAGARAGAN 