E-COMMERCE + AR
House2Home
An e-commerce website that sells affordable decor items & accessories.
UX Designer & Researcher
Role
A Week
Timeline
Sketch, Figma, InVision
Tools
GV Design Sprint
Methodology
What’s Design Sprint?
Overview
House2Home is a new startup that wants to make it easier for people to decorate their new homes and apartments on a budget. It’s an interior design e-commerce website is aimed at helping people make their homes look beautiful & stylish without breaking the buck.
Challenge
Believe it or not, Stephen Gates, ex-head of design @InVision and his wife have been the main source of inspiration for me. What is even more fascinating in this story is that Stephen himself somehow came across my portfolio and wrote me a warm email, which made my heart full. It’s amazing how life works! 💫
Stephen hosts “The Crazy One” podcast dedicated to design and creativity. I’m a huge fan of it, it helped me break into design when I felt so lost on my journey. In one of the episodes, Stephen shared a story about how he and his wife shop for decorative pieces for their home. I found it hilarious + he’s a great story teller! One day they go to a home decor store, and he finds that stunning piece that he absolutely loves. He thinks it will look great in their living room, a match made in heaven. Super excited, he shows it to his wife anticipating nothing less than a “wow”. She ends up not sharing his excitement, she couldn’t imagine this being part of their home. Like, no way.
Here’s how Stephen goes about it: being an empath, he can build understanding and compassion in this situation. His wife isn’t working in a creative field, her brain works in a different way, and it’s hard for her to envision things before they manifest in reality. So, he decides to do an experiment. He takes a photo of that decorative piece, comes back home, takes a photo of their living room. He then incorporates that piece into their living room using Photoshop. 🙂 He shows it to his wife again, and this time she goes: “Oh, that looks lovely!” That made me think about customers as of Stephen’s wife, they have the same concern:
The items look great in a home decor store or on a website, but will they look great together in their homes?
Okay, challenge accepted.
Design Constraints
Website
The solution should be designed as website, starting with designs for desktop & laptop screens
Starter Kit
Focus on helping users that want a “started kit” of multiple products to decorate a new apartment
$10 – $50
House2Home focuses on decorative products & accessories. It doesn’t sell furniture, appliances or other large pieces
Alright, let’s get this party started. ↓
Day 1
GOALS
• Understand the problem and the user’s pain points
• Pick an important area to focus on
• Start at the end by mapping a possible end-to-end user scenario
Understand Customers
I created a survey to reach my target audience for this project. I have recruited 10 participants and asked each one of them a series of questions to better understand the problem space and help uncover users’ concerns when hunting for decorative pieces on a budget .Through surveys & interviews, I was able to obtain the data that helped me get the key insights listed below.
Key Insights
Persona
After analyzing and synthesizing the qualitative research data, I created a persona to create reliable and realistic representations of my key audience segment.
How Might We?
Below are the questions I need to answer as a designer in order to be able to turn customer’s challenges and pain points into opportunities for design.
User Map
Day 2
GOALS
• Competitor analysis
• Identifying the critical screen
• Sketch out competing solutions
Lightning Demos
I went through several existing apps to find inspiration and get an idea of what competitors have to offer in this domain.
& Other Stories
This page is a great source of inspiration for me in terms of sharing people’s personal success stories and getting feedback. A most of y users mentioned, they usually search for that “look” on Pinterest, and then find it challenging to recreate the style from the staged photo. Well, why not look for inspiration from real photos done by real people in real homes?
Havenly
As most users mentioned that in the perfect world they’d want to hire an interior designer who knows their tastes and how to find things to make “that” look come to life, I decided to find out if any e-commerce websites offer any sort of surveys or tests to help customers recreate the style they want.
And I came across Havenly – a website that offers customers take a quiz to understand their unique style. I took the quiz myself and soon realized it was part of the onboarding process with lots of steps to get users sign up for their real design services. This experience doesn’t align with my users’ true needs. But the idea of a quiz is something I got inspired by. 
What if an AI algorithm could show users the interior looks based on their quiz answers and then show decorative pieces used to create that look?
Zara
There’s something incredibly useful that I came across on Zara’s website! Once you’ve chosen the item you like, you are offered other items that all match altogether. And they aren’t just pictures for reference, like on Pinterest, but these items are actually available for sale on the website. That approach instantly resonated with me. The reason is that most of the users i interviewed, mentioned they wish they could get a “started kit” of multiple products that match together in terms of looks and feel.
Crazy 8s
Once I’ve analyzed and narrowed down my ideas, I spent one minute on each of 8 small rough sketches shown below to come up with different screen variations.
Solution Sketch
As a next step, I picked one screen from Crazy 8s exercise and sketched out a solution, a three-panel board that shows the succession of steps that need to be undertaken by users.
Day 3
GOALS
• Make decisions
• Turn ideas into a testable hypothesis
• Storyboarding
The Story In Sketches…
…Transformed Into Web Experience
… and Mobile App + Augmented Reality
Day 4
GOALS
• Creating a realistic prototype
Step 1: Web Prototype
The website is the entry point in the user experience. After users completed the quiz and were brought to the results page, the next step is opening a mobile app, which will allow them see the items in Augmented Reality.
Step 2: Mobile Prototype + AR
Switching to Augmented Reality. ✨
Day 5
GOALS
• Validate assumptions
• Get feedback from real users
Usability Testing
As this user experience consists of 2 steps, I put together 2 prototypes in InVision: web. & mobile. I then asked the participants to complete the following task. The user group consisted of 10 people.
User Task:
“Let’s assume you just moved into a new studio apartment and you are looking to buy 3 decorative items: a throw pillow, a wall art and a vase. Your budget is $50 max for each items. You are naturally drawn to clean, minimalist and light styles. Find 3 pieces for your new studio based in the criteria above.”
User Feedback
WHAT I LEARNED
Key Takeaways
There were a few things that stood out to me when I was designing House2Home.
First of all, the power of competitive analysis. I truly believe it should be an indispensable part of the design process. Not only it helps to catch the inspiration, but also see the flaws in existing experiences and make sure you won’t fall into making the same mistake. Take Target, for example. It offers a great feature that allows users visualize items in their homes. But for some reason, it’s only available for large, bulky items, like furniture. I’m really curious, why? What was driving this decision? Or Havenly website -when I saw their quiz, it instantly hooked me in! However, I didn’t make it till the end, and I can anticipate most of their customers drop halfway through, and conversion fails – why on earth so many questions, some being very personal? It felt like interrogation.
The second thing I learned was to stay focused on customers and their needs, not mine. Don’t add unnecessary features assuming people will like them as much as you do. When designing, at some point I got some inspiration and was drawn to add extra features, like 3D visualization, etc. I had to stop myself and go back to research findings to design experience for people, not me. Although I truly believe you should always listen to your gut feeling when making personal decisions, but when it comes creating experiences for others – trust data first, then your instincts.