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 on a mission to make home decorating simple, stylish, and affordable. Its interior design e-commerce platform helps people transform new homes and apartments into beautiful, thoughtfully designed spaces – without overspending.
Challenge
Believe it or not, one of my biggest sources of inspiration has been Stephen Gates – former Head of Design at InVision and his wife. What makes this even more special is that Stephen somehow came across my portfolio and sent me a warm, heartfelt email. It absolutely made my day and reminded me how beautifully unpredictable life can be. 
Stephen hosts The Crazy One, a podcast about design and creativity that played a huge role in helping me break into the field, especially during times when I felt completely lost. In one episode, he shares a hilarious story about shopping for home décor with his wife that really stuck with me.
They’re browsing a store when Stephen spots a decorative piece he instantly falls in love with. He envisions it perfectly placed in their living room—design magic! Excited, he shows it to his wife, expecting a “Wow!” Instead, she’s totally unimpressed. She just can’t picture it in their home. Like, hard pass.
Here’s where Stephen’s empathy kicks in. He understands that, unlike him, his wife doesn’t work in a visual field—she needs to see things to believe in them. So he decides to run a little experiment: he snaps a photo of the item, takes a photo of their living room, and uses Photoshop to mock it up. When he shows her the edited image, she finally sees what he saw. “Oh, that looks lovely!” she says.
That story clicked for me. It helped me reframe our customers as people just like Stephen’s wife. They walk through a store or browse online, wondering:
This looks great here, but will it actually look good in my home?
Okay, challenge accepted.
Design Constraints
Website
The experience should be designed as a fully responsive website, beginning with desktop and laptop layouts to ensure future scalability.
Starter Kit
Prioritize users looking for a “starter kit” – curated bundles of multiple decorative items to set up a new apartment quickly and affordably.
$10 – $50
House2Home specializes in decorative accessories within a $10 – $50 range, excluding large furniture or appliance items.
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
Key Takeaways
A few things stood out to me while designing House2Home.
First, the value of competitive analysis. I now see it as an essential part of the design process, not just for inspiration, but for identifying gaps and avoiding common pitfalls. For example, Target has a great feature that lets users visualize furniture in their space. But why limit it to only large, bulky items? Why not include smaller decor? It made me question the reasoning behind that decision. Another example is Havenly. Their quiz initially drew me in: it was beautifully crafted and engaging. But I never finished it. I imagine many users drop off halfway, likely due to the sheer number of overly personal questions. It started feeling less like a fun quiz and more like an interrogation. Moments like these helped me stay mindful of the user journey and potential friction points.
Second, stay focused on the user, not yourself. It’s easy to fall into the trap of designing features you personally find exciting. I had moments where I was tempted to add extras like 3D visualization just because they felt cool. But I had to remind myself: I’m not the end user. Instead, I returned to the research and grounded my decisions in real needs and data. While intuition plays a key role in personal decisions, when you’re creating experiences for others, data should lead, and instincts can follow.