HomeHello
Founded in 2014, with main headquarter located in Pyrmont and offices in Melbourne CBD , HomeHello aims to bring happiness and smiles to all homes across Australia. Through our simple and affordable way of connecting Australians with passionate service providers, we have already provided thousands of Sydney and Melbourne homes with seamless professional cleaning experiences.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of the company.
My Role
I joined the startup after 3 months from its launch. Given important responsibilities were to redesign web interfaces used by clients, partners and internal stakeholders to improve user experience and productivity.
One of my core contribution was evolving product design process based on design principles and modern design tools. My design process provided more effective design solution and speed up development process. Technically, I brought data-driven decision management and rapid prototyping techniques to the company.
My UX design decision model.
Competitor Analysis
To get a better understanding about the system, analysing competitors' products would be great method to understand their design principles. From this analysis, I expected an overall look of strengths and weaknesses of the company's products.
I conducted comparison and analysis on different brands across US, UK and Australia market. The tricky part was registering accounts for US and UK based products. Their system detect our IP addresses (which tell we are not from their countries, areas).
There are two ways to obtain genuine accounts from their systems. One is set up VPN (Astrill, for example) to fake one. Second method is to get some one actually live there to get real accounts.
After obtained multiple accounts from them, we conducted analysis on all their products including web interfaces and mobile apps.
Below are some of criteria we used to analyse the competitor's product design
"Sydney is seen as a duplication of American metropolitan culture, and therefore has the same degree of modernism and the same conceptualisation of time. However, Australians do not worry as much about whether things will be accomplished in a certain amount of time, compared to Americans who worry all the time, about time."
(Dewhirst, 1989; Lattas, 1992)
Heuristic Evaluation
In order to get a complete picture about our product. I decided to drill down current websites (both front end and back-end) to construct a heuristic evaluation. This was the crucial research activity before I got into design phase.
Stakeholders Insight and Exploration
I teamed up with developers, customers services specialist and product manager to uncover insights and translate concepts into features that address customer behaviours and motivations.
Plan and Tools
I created wireframe and prototypes to based on the vision, design principles and content strategy. Axure was used to create wireframes and prototypes while Affinity Designer was used to produced graphic assets.
The Challenge
Within a year, there were 4 new players come into the on demand service market. The market share was redistributing among existing and new platforms steadily. For Homehello, this signalled a dramatic competition in the market.
Our challenge was to evolve with customers and become a market leader in the highly competitive on‐demand house services segment in Australia.
Introducing new client dashboard
Establishing customers' loyalty through freedom
Hello New Home
A frustrating customer will definitely get you down easily just because he could not refer his favourite cleaner or could not modify their cleaning details as supposed to.
The real need was to provide customers interfaces to let them manage their information the way that they think best.
Also, the goal was to blend the company's image as deep as it could into every product. This way, we aimed to create strong value of outstanding services while always remind them relationship between HomeHello - Reliable - Professional - Trusted.
We down to revamp entire user admin pages, booking processes and customers dashboard.
Introducing new Admin Panel
Boost productivity through centralisation
When Trello marries Wunderlist
Processing requests, reassigning bookings, organising meetings.. were popular daily tasks that the teams were working on. To store and retrieve these information, the teams used combinations of third party apps like Trello, Wunderlist, Slack...
Those tools were definitely wonderful at the company's early phase. The company grown dramatically, led to increasing number of relational transactions and complex workflow. It needs something better fit than those tools.
This was the reason we came up the idea "centralising admin panel" where we can take notes, assign tasks, resolve tickets, issue invoices, create balance sheet, etc. So, we made it.
