Cameo Consulting Contract
Photo by Jennifer Lee
For this 4 month project...
I was the UX Researcher and Designer for Cameo Consulting’s startup client, Naybur. My role was designing the user experience of their minimum viable product. Naybur’s goal is to connect homeowners to local route-based businesses. A route-based business is any business who travels to their customers to provide their services, such as a plumber, electrician or contractor.
I broke this project into three major phases: User Research, Initial Designing, and User Testing & Iteration.
User Research
When starting the project, I was handed market research findings such as where Naybur fit into the market, it’s target users, and other strategic information. We still needed to better understand the target homeowners’ and route-based businesses’ current expectations and emotional experiences.
I decided that interviewing would be the best method to gather an in-depth understanding of emotional experiences, expectations, and frustrations current homeowners and route-based businesses experienced when completing a home project.
Recruiting Hurdles
I found target homeowner participants were easy to find from reaching out to family, friends, and client connections. Route-based businesses were much tougher to speak to. I found cold-calling businesses often received negative responses, as businesses did not have the time to do an interview (even if short). After awhile of failing to get participants, we began to offer Amazon gift cards. This still failed to recruit participants, even after increasing the reward price. At this point I began to physically visit addresses around LA where the route-based businesses were listed at. I found that most addresses listed were not valid, since route-based businesses did not need to rent office space. I eventually got participants through the snow-balling method, contacting family and friends who owned route-based businesses and so on.
After this experience, I also asked in advance if the same participants would be interested in user testing sessions in the future to ease recruitment.
Interviewing and Data Analysis
I interviewed each participant for 30 minutes via phone call. I spoke with five homeowners and three route-based businesses. I also was able to interview a woman who did digital consulting for route-based businesses and how she interacted with her clients.
I used a rainbow spreadsheet to be able to quickly see commonalities between the participants.
I also used findings to create personas. I also created journey maps for to map out potential areas where Naybur could have a positive impact on the user’s experience.
Initial Designs
To pair with my primary user research, I signed up and went through the flows of the listed competitor websites. I went into the design process knowing it will be iterative. So for the first output I focused more on creating clear user flows and less on the branding and design. Since the Naybur product had two target groups, homeowners and businesses, there were two separate flows designed for each.
The tool I used to create the wireframes was Sketch and I used the online tool Figma to create prototypes.
User Testing & Iterative Design
I hosted remote user testing sessions using the Zoom video software and Figma prototypes. I ran three rounds of moderated usability sessions, each focusing on a different aspect of the Naybur prototypes.
User Testing Round 1
Round 1 focused on testing the user flows, specifically the sign up process for both businesses and homeowners, user expectations for feature affordances, constraints, and feedback from actions. This prototype consisted of mostly lorem ipsum dummy-text for more detailed information. I created tasks and gave the tester more verbal information about the context for why they may have landed on this website.
User Testing Round 2
Round 2 focused on user flow expectations and specific design elements such as buttons and links. This version of the prototype still consisted of lorem ipsum dummy-text.
User Testing Round 3
Round 3 focused on design elements such as buttons and links, branding, and the final website copy. During this round of testing, I gave minimal context and was looking to see if the website conveyed the service being provided accurately and easily.
The end result was Hi-fidelity mockups (Sketch Files) for web.
Reflection
In reflection, this was a large project where I could have benefited by distributing more workload to a UI designer. In doing so, I could have better caught some issues earlier on - such as planning for and setting expectations for creating the additional screens for web responsiveness. Only the web version of the website was user tested.
Especially after gaining more experience post-project, I see areas where I could have created a more efficient workflow during this project. I also see areas where I could have been more defined on where I was willing to apply my skillsets, such as focusing less on branding, and more on UX.