Building a dream home
The client wanted to provide a great customer experience to dream home aspirants. They wanted to address their customers needs and expectations that are driven by quality, positivity and with the assurance to bridge the gap between dream and reality.
While traditional players in the market focus on only one area, square feet wants expand themselves to bring these areas together for their customers so that they don't struggle with building their perfect home.
The idea was for the client to become a service aggregator in home construction market in India. This meant covering a wide area of services from visualizing home, help finance the project, plan, execute the dream home project and deliver the key finally to their clients. With no existing solution at hand, an MVP to jumpstart their services is the viable action to take.
The First step is always understanding the stakeholders, then aligning with their interests
1. Understand the business landscape.
2. Achieve consensus between stakeholders
3. Find oppurtunities to impact pain points
4. Find services that we can work on now and implement later
5. Understand expections of UX intervention
Visualize
As the project is a culmination of long term services, visualizing the stakeholders idea through Lego Serious Play helped simplify the service structure and challenges we might face in the implementation. It also helped communicate connection between different construction services offered.
Agents of Impact
From the workshop, the key elements that require for costruction of a dream homes were identified and categorized to focus on their experience individually. This also helped in finding which part the client can implement right now and also build a future plan to cover all agents of impact.
Home aspirants
As client and a key part of the business, onboarding experience for home aspirants was given most priority for project initiation.
Key segments include
1. Check out beautiful and modern homes for your site
2. Verify aspirant site ownership in one click and allow us to show your your dream home on it
3. Confirm budget and site details to see designs that home aspirants can choose from
4. Select a design and force fit budget or change configurations to see an estimate
5. Comparison (time, quality, price and long term value) between getting construction done through individual contractors and squarefeet.com
6. Communication with team and onboarding for potential engagement
To facilitate these requirements, the system requires
Web application
Sales and Marketing
Customer relationship manager
Architect
Civil Contractor
Home financier
Water vendor
Quality checking team
Insights and goals
From stakeholder workshops, solutions were spread out and prioritized in a value-proposition canvas
Benchmarking
With features to implement an MVP in place, next process was to look at similar contenders in the market.
Few features that caught attention were
Online builder
having a custom online builder tool help users visualize better. This also gives them an idea on how each options affect the house design.
Estimate calulator for the build plan
Giving an estimate early on while designing help in selecting materials and size of the house for user.
Placing interior options in design
Placing interior options impoves the visual quality of the plans and is more similar to final product. For customers, it is one less thing to worry about.
Customized plan sharing and review
For indian consumers building homes, opnions of elderly and friend is considered. Sharing the plan render directly from site makes the process easy.
Pre-approved plans
Getting their dream home plan approve by architect, structure engineers and for getting financial support are time consuming. Having pre-approved plans helps a lot.
Now let's see how user goes through this...
Collating requirements and research a basic proto persona and a user journey was created to understand the flow.
Stories to wireframes
Starting with wireflows, each iterations helped in confirming ideas developed in brainstorm sessions. The early iterations of wireframes was detailed to understand how to categorize customizations and messaging.
UI
Visual Design
The website offers lots of customizations to it’s users when starting off and it is necessary to reduce the cognitive load. So, a minimal visual style was implemented with lots of spacing between sections. The primary color used from their branding was closer to indicative colors normally used in UI, so the usage of the colors were kept very minimal in all layouts.
