HomesRunner

Project Overview

My role

  • UX Designer and Researcher

Methods & Tools

  • Heuristics Analysis

  • Usability Test

  • Affinity Diagramming

The founder of HomesRunner mobile app, would like to better understand how the flow of the mobile app could be improved to streamline the customer experience for finding the best service provider at the best price. My team and I evaluated the app to gain a better understanding of the functionality as well as get inside the mindset of the primary customers. Recommendations provided in this report will enhance the customer experience.

Full view of the Findings and Recommendations report can be found here.

The Client

The HomesRunner app allows homeowners to get multiple bids for the same project or request on-demand service to lower stress and financial burdens. Their goal is to empower customers in need of home services - at the best possible price - by directly connecting them to providers in their area.

Project Goal

Provide client with recommendations from our findings to streamline the customer experience.

Checking the Foundation

Before running a usability test, it was important to get an intimate understanding of how the HomesRunner app worked. In order to do so, I ran a conducted an analysis using Nielsen’s Heuristics to gain insight on what attributes within the app worked well or may need improvement.

Based on the Heuristics analysis, there were areas of opportunity to create more or reduce friction when completing a task.

Recruiting Test Participants

A total of 9 participants were recruited for our next phase, Usability testing. A few parameters were set in order to include representative users for the HomesRunner app.

Criteria

  • Has a mobile device

  • Consent to being recorded

  • Was/Is a homeowner

  • Has dealt with home service providers to some degree

Focusing on the Goals

✓
✎

In order to ground our Usability test, we set 3 research goals that would be the touchstone for our plan and testing script.

  • Understand how this app empowers users from lowering stress and financial burdens during home project/repair.

  • Identify if the user understands the purpose of the app.

  • Identify if users are able to navigate the “core” functions of the app:

    • Bidding

    • On-Demand

    • Choose Provider

Evaluation Blueprint

Once our research goals were finalized, our approach to conducting the test was to ask the participant 3 scenarios that would put them in the shoes of a potential customer’s experience. Followed by asking the participant to rate the ease of the completing the task.

Each scenario was tailored to the fundamental purposes of the 3 core functions that were identified in the client and our goals.

  • Most affordable - Bidding

  • Emergency response - On Demand

  • Preferred provider - Choose Provider

sifting through the nuts and bolts

These were the findings that stood out to me the most.

  • 9/9 participants did not realize that they had not completed the bidding function and needed to be prompted to continue.

  • 8/9 participants were surprised from the On-Demand function output.

  • 9/9 participants struggled to find their preferred provider.

  • 6/9 Participants attempted or expressed the desire to bypass the repetitive steps required to be able to see the list of providers.

  • Notable observations included:

    • Participant clicking the different primary services to see the sub categories because they were unsure of which service they needed.

    • Participant commented “If the list of previous bookings was really long, then it would be painstaking to have to comb through each listing to find old booking information.”

My research group and I collected our observations utilizing Trello, an online kanban board. This enabled us to code our observations to make the synthesizing our findings easier.
“I could hardly tell there was a swipe up menu. The green arrow blends in with the map.”
— Participant 3
“Oh, so you can scroll left and right to see the different providers. I didn’t think it would scroll, but I just guessed since the map doesn’t show you much.”
— Participant 9

hitting the nail on the head

After reviewing all of the findings there were 2 themes that became very clear:

  1. There is a lack of clear signifiers to help users understand what they should expect to do next on the app.

  2. The rigid and repetitive steps bored or frustrated the users once they were familiar with navigating the app.

Recommendations

Based on the results from my research, my recommendation would be to prioritize solutions that help the users understand where and how to navigate the app more efficiently.

This could look like:

  • Making icons/buttons more prominent to increase accessibility.

  • Adding confirmation or loading messages to ensure users understand what to expect.

  • Adding notifications for tasks that require users to wait for external input to ensure users know where to navigate next.

  • Including search and filter functionality to