Curb Appeal
The Challenge: While Nick has ran a successful landscaping company for the past eight years, he has never had any web presence.
Overview
Timeline: 4 Weeks
Problem Statement: My goal was to create a user centered app that would not only be easy to navigate for potential clients, but is also intuitive and easy to use for current clients.
Client: Curb Appeal Landscaping
Roles:
UX Designer
UI Designer
Brand Designer
UX Researcher
Tools:
Figma, FigJam, Google Forms, Zoom, Google Docs, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
Deliverables:
User Interviews, User Persona, User Flows, User Story, Empathy Map, Site Map, Wireframes, Branding, Usability Tests, Prototype
Discover
Research
User interviews:
Since lawncare services are really only used by home/property owners, I started off the process by interviewing ten different home owners ranging from the age of 30-75. Four out of the ten participants currently used a lawncare service.
“At the end of the day I obviously am still able to do all of my yard work myself, so cost is probably the most important thing to me. The output has to outweigh the input.”
“The thing that annoys me the most with my current lawncare service is how hard it is to find past invoices on their website.”
Define
Empathy Map
User Personas
After conducting all of the user interviews and putting together an empathy map to try to get inside the mind of the core users, we put together these two personas.
User Stories
1: “As a potential new customer, I care most about cost, and quality. Why would I pay someone to do my lawncare to make it look worse than I can. I want to see what other peoples properties look like so I can envision my own.”
2: “As a returning customer, I want it to be as easy as possible to see all the things I care about. When is the next visit? How much do I owe? Can I see the invoice so I can see the breakdown?”
User Flows
Design
Sketches & Wireframes
Develope
High Fidelity Mockup
Deliver
Usability Testing
I gathered six people over two days and did all in person testing. I presented one of the two users stories listed above, and asked them to accomplish the user’s goal without assistance.
Takeaways:
Pros:
They liked the overall color scheme and found it visually appealing.
Felt it displayed all the information they could want to find as a potential client.
Cons:
While they like the color palate, they found the overall layout a bit boxy and repetitive.
Felt it was clumsy to negotiate with the search bar.
Wanted tabs on each page to navigate.
Conclusion
Solution:
The main concerns of the users were to be able to get as live and up to date information as possible. This would not only save unwanted or unnecessary headaches down the line by being late, but also lead to a better user experience and return users. Next stop was able to get the information the user was looking for, in as few steps as possible.
Takeaways:
From this project, I learned a lot of invaluable lessons. Firstly, I learned that while you might be sold on an idea, the only opinion that truly matters is the users. I felt that my first mockups were good, but upon user testing, they fell quite short of others expectations. Learning to try and see a project from the users point of view and not mine, is an invaluable asset that I will need to utilize going forward.