Our project focused on streamlining the process of homebuying for millennials . Our client, Homebuddy, wanted to accomplish this by providing the user with a Homebuddy concierge that would guide them through all stages of the homebuying and home owning experience.
Timeline - 3 one week sprints
Tools - Sketch, Axure
Teammates - Nikki Heyman, Claire Eisenhuth, Irene Montalban
Homebuddy is a startup that originally focused on custom home maintenance reminders based on recommended manufacturer’s maintenance timeframes. Their goal was to help new homeowners keep track of their things, and in the long run, saves them money. Their whole philosophy is to maintain something rather than wait for it to break.
Before our kickoff meeting, we wanted to gain alignment on a problem statement that combines both the pre and post timelines of homebuying. Our team formulated a problem statement based on our assumptions regarding the current website and how we may be able to expand upon it. Our problem statement read:
The main goal of our meeting is to figure out where Homebuddy is trying to position itself in the market. Ryan, our primary client and Homebuddy’s CEO is essentially trying to shake up the real estate market, turning it from a relationship driven business, into a data driven business. Ryan wants to replace traditional real estate agents, and to an extent brokerages, with a Homebuddy employee that will also serve as a concierge post closing.
Our main takeaway from the meeting was that Ryan and his team need the research to see what their users want, and where Homebuddy could live as a product. They have tasked us with finding potential gaps in the market. Homebuddy does not have to be a digital product, it just needs to be a service where someone can come in and have someone help them with the entire home buying and home ownership process.
After the client kickoff meeting, we realized that due to time constraints, we needed to find an opportunity in the user journey that would help Homebuddy thrive. In our research, we a wide net and find anything that would help bridge the gap between home buying and homeownership responsibilities.
The first thing I put together was a user journey experience of how the homebuying process could go for our target users. The journey map is based domain research into how someone initiates the home buying process. I also went through the process of finding repair professionals on Angie’s list and Yelp. Our Research Plan answered the following:
Our team conducted multiple interviews with both millennial home buyers and millennial homeowners. We wanted to interview both to see if there were any disconnects during the transition of home buyer to homeowner. This also serves as an opportunity to gain insights and retrospective from the point of view of the homeowner, especially since they just went through the home buying process.
The main motivation for buying a home is an investment. Millennial home buyers want to stop renting and start investing in their own property.
“I’m looking for something new because I’m not going to do maintenance.” - David
Our next step was to see why millennials would rather buy new than do maintenance. We found that 68% of millennials have regrets about buying a home, wishing they had been more prepared going into the purchase. One of the biggest regrets millennial homebuyers have is not understanding the costs involved to maintain a house.
“I’m not really handy around the house. So I’m scared what if I break something? Right now I have my landlord to help me.” - Alita
We assumed that the realtor is a wealth of information for our users so we did some research on their relationship with the home buyers. We found out pretty early on that not all realtors are created equal.
“No, no I wouldn’t imagine her [realtor] to be able to tell me about home maintenance.” - Colin
The realtor is an interesting avenue to explore, but it goes against Homebuddy’s business goal of replacing the realtor with a concierge service.
After speaking to our users, we spoke with some of SMEs to find the gap within the home owning and home buying experiences. We spoke to two realtors and one home inspector to gain their perspectives on the process.
Through interviews and domain research, we have discovered that the home inspection is usually the catalyst for a home purchase. According to our SMEs, 80% of homeowners who have the home inspection, go through with purchasing the property. The home inspection is the first time that our users are exposed to anything that could potentially go wrong in the property they are viewing.
We wanted to validate further whether home inspection is where we could focus our project. We took all of our interview insights and mapped them according to goals, behaviors, motivations and frustrations.
Our affinity map exercise strengthened our opportunity to target the home inspection as the biggest opportunity for us to explore.
What we learned about our user group: Millennial first time home buyers
With the data and the opportunity we found, we narrowed down the problem statement into a more concise part of the user journey. The most surprising avenue we found is the reactivity when it comes to repairs. We also found that a lot of users know very little about home maintenance. We thought that by narrowing down our scope, we could create a product that better serves our user’s needs.
After all of our research, we wanted to include the home inspection into our user journey because we have identified it as the gap between home buying and home owning. Most millennials aren’t thinking about maintenance until this part of the process.
Based on our research our users really responded to transparent information conveyed in a way familiar to them. Before designing and creating concepts, we kept these three design principles in mind.
Before concepting, we wanted to keep these questions in mind:
• How do we motivate millennials to do home maintenance?
• Where does a concierge fit within the whole product we’re trying to make?
• How can we make the repair experience easier for millennials?
• How do we make sure that millennials are paying attention to their home inspection?
The first thing I considered in concepting is how the concierge would work within the product space. I diagrammed a flow exhibiting how the concierge would be connected to the user journey.
An all in one hub for all of your home value, home appliance information, maintenance, repair and renovation needs.
With this concept, we are motivating millennials into maintaining their homes by associating a dollar value into what they are doing, or not doing. We also convey this information in a way familiar to millennials. We used a lot of visuals and hierarchy to show millennials all of this information.
A scheduling tool for homeowners to coordinate maintenance, repair and renovation requests with Homebuddy recommended professionals.
In creating this concept, we are eliminating a step in booking repair professionals. This concept sets up the concierge as a point of contact for initiating scheduling for repairs.
We wanted to consider three things to incorporate in our MVP solution for Homebuddy:
• Encourage them to maintain their home
• Provide them data about their home
• Help them when they need repairs and maintenance
The Dashboard motivates the home owner by showing them their home value. Graphs of service histories are also included to predict home value into the future. The dashboard is the hub for monitoring everything in the house. Additionally, the dashboard has three distinct functions: