Overview

Nailed It is a well-thought business idea that inspired by one of our clients. He recognized an unfilled niche in how tradespeople connect with residential clients, as his daily job is a professional plumber.The project was more UX-focused and we have a month to provide in mid-fidelity as our client already had visual designer to work with in the future.

Challenge

In tradespeople perspective, the fact that trades industry in Vancouver is very traditional. It fueled on word of mouth. In this case, it is difficult for younger tradesperson to access larger network outside their family and friends, before they established the word of mouth by their current clients in years.

How do we motivate them to create a digital portfolio to showcase their work in order to help them expand business network? In other words, how do we digitalize their word of mouth?

Research

To understand our problem, we connected with 14 tradespeople for 1:1 interview and received over 50 survey responses from both homeowners and tradespeople. After that, we need to define the minimum viable product (MVP) to validate our vision. In order to develop the MVP for our website,we conducted in-depth competitive/comparative research. Interestingly, we actually want to sympathize with tradespeople, so we decide to go through the whole process by ourselves as well. We faked interior design company information to compared the process of creating an online portfolio in competitor's website.

We noticed that most of our competitors have a very boring sign-up process. The other thing we found that they more likely to focus on the experience in homeowner side and totally unbalance the experience of trade people who are going to provide the database for their website. According to our research we capture that most of tradespeoples in Vancouver are not consider themselves as tech savvy and they will easily get frustrated by complicated and information overloaded portfolio building process. It validates our primary hypothesis-- we need to design an easy portfolio building process.  We also find out some interesting fact, for example, homeowners are more comfortable using cellphone compare to contractors who are more comfortable using PC.

Next step is to prioritize the business goal and users goal,so that we can find the right strategy for Nailed It.

Thus,our unique selling points(USP) is an online portfolio website for tradespeople to showcase their work in an easy and fun way.

In a week of data collecting and analyzing, we created our primary personas

Matt is a down-to-earth plumber in his early 30s,he uses social media and Microsoft products but he doesn't consider himself a tech savvy person, he will leave a site if it's overly complicated for him, He has been working for a large corporation for a couple years. He wants to break out on his own and start his own company.

Storyboard Time

Matt comes home from a particularly frustrating day where his client was being overly demanding. Because he works for a company, he can’t help but receive the jobs he’s given.  He feels like he’s finally ready to break out with his own company. Although he’s comfortable with social media and email, he isn’t used to advertising online but would like to improve his online presence. He’s open to learn and create an account if the site is beneficial to him. But he wishes there was a better way to be matched with clients he actually enjoys working with. He’s browsing Facebook on his computer where he comes across an ad for NailedIt!

The next step is to visualize the wireframes in paper prototype and get tested before we iterate any design into mid-fidelity wireframes and develop the site map to visualize the concept we have developed.

A/B Testing

In order to validate the design we made, I conducted usability testing through Pass/Fail Rate Form

P=Pass S=Satisfactory F=Failure

We give Pass will be 1 point.Satisfactory 0.5 points.Failure will be 0 point.

One of the problem we identified through A/B testing was the 5a Page.The original paper prototype had a save & preview button because we wanted to give the option for users to preview and save what they have done.

But during the testing we found out that it often confused them and prevented them from continuing the profile building process. Psychologically, after investing a certain amount of time, people want to know how much they’ve accomplished.  So we made some changes and chose to use a progressive bar instead.(on the right)

Design Detail

From our research we know tradespeople are more familiar with PC. One of the major design incorporated in our website is Wins 10's module design.The position memory will help them ease the learning curve with familiar interface.

By building progressive disclosure and gamification in sign-up process, we are able to provide a fun experience for tradespeople.As they completed the profile from 10-50% ,the nail will go further every percentage. :  )

Sometimes it will be difficult for tradespeople to write about yourself and ask clients for review after a long day work.We design to provide a certain generic message .Thus ,users can know what to start and provide the professional standard for them to consider.

The Outcome

As our client have their own visual designer, after 2 weeks of preparation, we delivered mid-fidelity prototype.

The Future Vision

The website is still in the develop phase.For me ,this was my first ONLY UX involved project.It was really interesting to get to know users and provide an innovative solution for them to address the pain point.Our team was excited to work on this project as well, not only because our clients were down-to-earth and passionate about their business idea, but also 4 of us all had bad user experience in finding a right tradespeople online to fix home issues in Vancouver in the past. We are happy to have this opportunity to be part of the solution.

Thank you for reading my work. : )