UX/UI Design
Research
Information Architecture
Visual Design
Interactive Prototyping
Testing
User Surveys
Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
User Personas
User Stories
User Flows
Site Map
Wireframes
Style Guide
User Tests
Hi-fi Mockups
Prototype
Paper and Ink
Google Slides
Design Sprint
Unsplash
Adobe Photoshop
InVision
Figma
4 Weeks
Product’s Owner
Mentor
My client wanted to create a handymen membership program, where handymen will pay a monthly fee and have access to freelance jobs in their area. And customers can use the application to hire and automatically pay qualified workers to complete a job on their house.
Houses require a lot of maintenance and repairs. Homeowners don’t have the necessary tools, knowledge and/or time to tagle every maintenance, repair, and installation task in their house on their own every single time. They need a helping handyman. But hiring someone can be difficult and stressful.
I designed an application that allows users to hire reliable handymen interested in the job opportunity in an easy and simple facilitated system. With Tool, customers can now quickly hire a handyman for any home fix job.
I created a user survey to obtain quantitative data on my users’ experience with handymen services. 12 renters and homeowners from major cities around the country took the survey.
Understanding my users’ behaviors gave me a clearer idea of the features that I needed to include in the application.
I then conducted user interviews where the user walked me through their handyman hiring process.
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I learned that handymen need to come over and look at your house before they can give you a quote. This is inconvenient and frustrating for the customer.
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After understanding my users, I created two personas. I determined the Customer for this application is a person who values service, who needs a physical house problem resolved, who is honest and practical, enjoys easy transactions and knows that someone else with experience in a particular subject can do a better job than they can.
Fatima Shree, 32
Financial Analyst
Miami, FL
Fatima is a caring daughter and has a close relationship with her mother. She bought her elderly mother a 55” flat screen tv and now needs someone to install it on the wall at her mother’s house. She considers herself to be an independent problem solving woman and is driven by practically.
• Find a handyman with tv mount installation experience
• Expects handyman to be honest, fair, trustworthy & efficient
• Wants her mom to be happy and satisfied
• Desires a low effort, smooth and easy transaction
• People who try to take advantage of her financially
• Making an easy situation complicated and non practical
• She is depended on someone else because the tv is too heavy and needs a strong person to help her
Tom Howard, 44
Business Owner
Austin, TX
Tom and his wife are expecting their second baby. He runs his own jewelry company and between dealing with vendors, employees, and customers, he has no time left to paint his upcoming baby’s nursery room. He values service and believes an experience painter will do a better job than he can.
• To find a reliable and skilled handyman to painter
• Is to continue to grow his family and business
• Handymen recommendations from his friends or family
• A handyman he can trust around his family for future projects
• Handymen that are not professional and reliable
• People that lie or waste his time
• Not knowing the work quality of the handyman
Then I created a Competitive Analysis between Craigslist, TaskRabbit, and Upwork because in all these applications you can hire people. They all had strengths and weaknesses.
• Simple steps to follow along when creating a listing
• The browse>main category>sub category search is easy to follow
• The listings search box and scroll motion is easy to use
• History, Saved and Favorites have different meaning
• The names of the categories are not intuitive with the content
• UI is not user centric
• Clean, minimalistic, non distracting screens
• The taskers’ profiles are easy to read.
• They include reviews, rating, bio, prices
• Easy way to tip the ‘tasker’
• The ‘tasker’ you choose may not be available at the time you requested
• Green UI feels environmentally friendly and that’s not what the app is about
• The user flows are easy to follow
• The progress bar when ‘posting a job’ is very intuitive and mindful
• It has ‘Job Listing’ templates the user can easily fill out
• The buttons have clear commands
• Overwhelm with the talent’s profiles and their specialties
• There’s a lot of little stuff to read and options that distracts the user
Next I conducted a design sprint, a 5-phase process that uses design thinking to answer business questions, help develop my products’ ideology , anticipate possible problems and test my solution.
I created a goal that aligned with my client’s needs, listed everything that might go wrong and created this initial Map.
I listed and categorized all the How Might We design questions, then I picked a target to test...which in this case I decided the most important part was How the Customer Can Hire a Handyman..
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I drew sketches that helped me understand the ideal process for this application..
Then I created a Storyboard that clarified my idea.
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And at this point I realized the location, set time and date of the job should be done at the beginning of the job listing creation and not after the customer has contacted the handyman like I had anticipated in my original Map.
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After understanding my users and reviewing my research, I created high and low priority user stories and developed them into user flows.
The User Flows helped me organize the process of each task in the application with the minimum amount of steps and problems a user can encounter.
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After that, I got started in creating my protype so I created a Site Map.
I drew sketches of how the app should be structured and how the screens could possibly look like. Then I redrew the best ones into Figma.
After I was done with the wireframes, I conducted a quick informal product testing, revised and changed the architecture of the app along the way.
The progression of the ‘Home Page’ changed for a more user centric approach and accessibility.
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After informal user testing I discovered users prefer a ‘Search Bar’ and the ‘Most Popular’ jobs for discovery. I changed the shapes around to make better use of the space and introduced color for accessibility.
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The name Tool was inspired by all the tools handymen carry with them and it makes a reference to the customer who might not have the necessary tools for a specific job in their house and needs to hire someone who does.
The colors of the application were inspired by the leather tool belt handymen wear. Orange represents activity and creativity and the grey radiant derives from metal tools. Montserrat font is recommended for accessibility and in this application it embodies efficiency.
After the wireframes, the structure of the pages and the branding of the application were completed, I created the first High Fidelity Mockup. Here the user gets a prototype with the major concepts worked out and a clickable experience.
I tested the application on two different home owners. The participants used a Figma clickable prototype on a computer screen and were recorded through Zoom. I gave them four tasks and asked them to perform these tasks on the application and talk out loud what they were doing while they were navigating through the application.
The participants gave valuable feedback, compliments and suggestions.
1. One participant used the search box to type in the category he was looking for and said he did not know the ‘Most Popular Jobs’ section in the home screen was scrollable.
2. One of the participants went back a screen to check the handyman’s hourly rate and check the math for the final cost.
One participant suggested an arrow at the end of the ‘Most Popular Jobs’ scrollable section in the homescreen.
I added the handyman’s hourly rate along with the final price in the ‘Details’ section so the customer doesn’t have to go back and the transaction can be smooth.
Tool was developed to join handymen and their customers in a facilitated marketplace where handymen can offer their services and obtained job opportunities and customers can hire reliable handymen for their home needs and make life easier.
The next step will be to create the handyman’s side of the application. This includes their profiles and proposal making process.
This product was successful because I created an Minimum Viable Product (MVP) used for customers to hire handymen for their home repairment needs. Due to time constraints, I wasn’t able to include a ‘Sharing’ button that allowed customers to share and recommend their favorite handymen to their friends and family. But the application has enough features to complete the goal with research and design justifications.
Thank you for stopping by, I hope you enjoyed my work. If you want to chat about UX or have any questions, feel free to
contact me.
