Integrados, the website where you can start your home renovation from scratch.
A Design Thinking Case Study
Are you feeling stuck with your refurbishment?
You wake up at 7 am and start your daily routine to work. You take a shower, get dressed and head towards the kitchen to have breakfast. But as you approach the fridge, bam! you slip and fall to the floor.
And all because of one of those loose pieces of wood that are part of your parquet flooring. You curse. What a way to start your day!
While you start getting up, your partner comes in and sees you. Again. One small glance and a look of disapproval sum up everything that is going to be expressed verbally in the following seconds of your joint coexistences:
“I told you, this floor is a mess. We need to get it fixed or one of these days we are going to get badly injured.”
I guess that everybody can see themselves in a situation like this at some point in their lives. There must be these questions/doubts floating around your head to finally start the “home renovation process”:
- Who do I contact? Are they going to provide me with all the details I need?
- Who do I trust to get this job done?
- Where can I find the information I need?
- Do I know anybody in this business?
- Has any friend or family member gone through the process? Were they happy with the outcome? Could they give me good tips or recommendations?
- How much is this going to cost? How long is it going to take?
Do you want to know how this experience can be improved? Follow me on this journey full of question marks and technicalities based on Madrid´s (ES) market.
RESEARCH
I started researching the Spanish online market with desk research, netnography and benchmarking techniques. I found that there are six different types of informative website groups:
- Architecture/3D offices: they display the projects they have worked on and offer online quotations based on details that the user needs to provide (like square meters, terrain´s inclination, etc…)
- Professional marketplaces: the user can search for professionals by postcode, specialty or both (carpentry, plumbing, architecture, etc..)
- Forums: full of untrustworthy advice for users.
- Quotation marketplaces: the user can receive quotations from several professionals by providing their refurbishment details.
- Retail refurbishment businesses: they sell materials, give tips, provide professional services, price guides and professional contacts (Leroy Merlin´s website for example)
- Glossary websites and refurbishment written guides: dense and very technical terms explained only with words (no interactive/ audiovisual options)
As a summary, any user looking for a fast and easy solution for their home investment can find themselves “alone in the dark”. There is a lack of unity with all of the above information structures and some of the businesses approach to users can be considered quite invasive, impersonal and unrealistic. To be honest, who knows how to measure the square meters of an area? Or even better, who has the time and energy to learn how to do it and think that it is going to be accurate?
To dig a little bit deeper, I conducted:
Three interviews → obtaining the following verbatim sentences:
“Clients don´t know what they want. This affects the whole process” Javier Goiti (Architect).
“You choose materials without knowing how they are going to look like in the refurbished area” /” There are many sloppy workers in this field working without any kind of regulation or control” María Hernández (Refurbishment Client).
“Clients want fast and cost-effective results” Ana García (Technical Architect).
A survey → focused on users that had already experienced a refurbishment in their home. These were the details that caught my attention the most of the 52 respondents:
71,2% of the interviewed users were between 25 and 46 years old, they had refurbished their entire home, using the recommendations provided by their friends and family (61,5%) as their main source of information.
When given a list of tools/support they would have appreciated having before they started the renovation, they selected: a full refurbishment audiovisual guide in the 1st place (48,1%), professional assistance in the 2nd place (42,3%) and an architectural rendering of the space in 3rd (34,6%).
Mystery shopper → I visited a nearby Leroy Merlin store and played the role of a user that wants to renovate her kitchen and doesn´t know anything about the process. I obtained the following verbatim sentences from one of their shop assistants:
“Home measurements and quotations get done manually on-site by a staff member.”
“We don´t offer space/materials rendering or any kind of visual representations”
“If another professional is in charge of installing our materials, your guarantee with us will not cover any damages”
USER DEFINITION
At this point in the investigation, I had a clear idea of who were my user personas and how their journeys would look like. Please meet Claudia and Francisco!
Although they both have different journeys they have similar pain points that cause frustrations. But the main user´s experience (Francisco) is much worse as he does not work in this field and doesn´t know the options he has or what he needs to do to start a renovation. By realizing this I was able to come up with the following insights:
- The existing renovation companies do not offer online personalized interactive experiences to their users in which they can choose and understand their refurbishment process.
- All of the information from this field is very technical (not easy to understand), scattered (not easy to find or integrate amongst them) and presented in unfriendly formats (audiovisual or interactive interfaces are not a common thing at all).
- Renovation previews are almost non-existent: architectural renderings are not an option for all users (they are expensive and take time to be produced).
- It is a field full of professional intrusions (this increases the error rates)
IDEATION
At this point, knowing who were the main users of this type of services and their main pain points, it was quite straight forward to come up with an idea that could improve their experience:
Once the main sections had been selected and defined, it was time to set up the website´s information architectures, the site map, and our main user´s flow:
BUSINESS MODEL
So how does Integrados work as a business model?- you may be thinking-
By a simplified representation of a hypothetical situation, I replied to six questions that conformed the value proposition canvas. Observing the user, the actions they wanted to perform, their gains and pains, I was able to set the value proposition of Integrados:
Extending the products and services displayed above, Integrados users would benefit from:
A) Online interactive renovation experience: users that don´t have much time can know in a couple of clicks what needs to be done towards their refurbishment (if they need a license or not, what works need to be done, which professionals can do the job,etc..).
B) Information & professionals integrated into one website: users have everything they need to start their renovation in one unique web.
C) Information is displayed in a more visual and user-friendly way: videos explaining each technical term that appears throughout all the websites in the Glossary page.
D) Professional services: contents of the website are developed by experienced workers in this field (architects, technical architects, etc..) and they are the ones visiting the user´s home, taking measurements and showing all the different materials and floor plan options in an Ipad. Once the contract is signed, they are the ones in charge of coordinating all the jobs with their own teams of contractors (carpenters, plumbers, etc..).
E) 100% guarantees signed by a binding legal contract between Integrados and the client: if the job is not done correctly or there are any difficulties, both parties are covered.
The objectives would be measured by the following KPI´s that would be followed up each quarter:
1. Registered users on the website (leads)
2. Confirmed measurement services (30 euros per user/home): processed online when the customer agrees to the job and pays for it.
3. Signed contracts: once the measurements are made, the final budget is sent to the customer through an online contract. This digital document is sent and signed by both parties including all guarantees and legal clauses.
PROTOTYPE
Now that the structures were set up, it was time to get started with the web site's design in Figma.
On the main home page, I included basic information about the provided services, the added value, and a small onboarding to explain how the interactive renovation page worked.
I wanted to create a basic-looking website, to reflect the user´s flow whilst using the interactive renovation feature as per the below video:
TESTING
To see if the prototype would be understood by all users, Francisco´s flow was tested online with 5 different people through Maze. I obtained a usability score of 87%!
The majority of users followed it well with a direct success and spent an average time of 8,6 s to complete the task.
There was a 2% misclick rate that was related to one of the screens in the process (screen 6).
2ND PROTOTYPE
Once I saw that the usability of the prototype had succeeded, I iterated the web site's design to convert it into a more aesthetic model as you can see in the below screenshot and video:
The style guide with all the typography fonts, sizes, components and colors of all of the different areas is summed up in this ZeroHeight file.
FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
Lastly, looking towards the future of this business, there are several aspects that could be improved as displayed below:
The website´s prototype would need to be iterated to improve the testing results (although a 2nd version has already been done). But before this happens, other tests would need to be done in terms of the website contents to see if the users find them useful, what could be eliminated, what could be added and how they would want it added.
Apart from the B2B collaborations mentioned above, perhaps there could be a DIY (do it yourself) home measurement app linked to the website so customers could skip the professional measurement part. But again, this would need to be checked internally and with previous clients to see if there would be any point to do this.
CONCLUSIONS
No matter how difficult a project is, you will always come up with a solution just by talking with different groups of people. Different minds= insights.
There is great room for improvement in this field (construction/architecture) in terms of UX/UI design. The existing websites and apps are not user-oriented at all and are outdated in terms of usability.
“An idea is salvation by imagination” — Frank Lloyd Wright.
