Independence
ROLE: UX Designer
DURATION: 3 weeks
I’ve never been good at home improvement. I don’t own a car (nor do I know a single thing about cars - this makes finding the correct Uber a comedy of errors for me), and yet I have tried to talk my mother through a tire change by looking solutions up on WikiHow. I’ve put some IKEA furniture together all by myself (which is very exciting for me), and yet I still watch that one kitchen chair I put together very carefully whenever a guest sits on it, hoping that today is not, in fact, the day that my shoddy workmanship finally falls apart.
What I’m trying to say here, is I am not particularly handy, but I am fantastically stubborn.
Discover
There are apps like Handy, TaskRabbit, and others that seek to solve your problems in a sort of “dating app” for people who just, y’know, know how to do stuff. I’ve used those before, and had pretty decent success - but I was curious about other users’ experiences with this kind of "hands-on help" product. When the idea for this app was floated, it was something similar to the above products, with a few features setting it apart - however, after doing a round of user interviews, the trends suggested something different!
Take control
Some insights weren’t terribly surprising - our users wanted the person they were chatting with to care about their problem, to feel like a human - who likes talking to robots? Not me! But the biggest (and most surprising) trend, across all users, was that they wanted a larger role in the problem solving. Interesting. Okay! So I developed our persona, Fred!
"I like doing stuff myself."
Our Fred here wants to try to solve his problem on his own, but needs some specialized help (without wasting unnecessary time, energy, or money.) How might we retain Fred’s sense of independence while getting him the specialized advice he needs?
Escalate
First, I wanted to know Fred’s flow through the app. To deal with problems of all sizes, I wanted to create a flow that would allow for quick questions, escalating all the way up to extended face-to-face conversations that would allow more detailed troubleshooting. All interactions had to be agreed upon by both parties to maintain user trust on both sides - no one wants some random FaceTime-ing them when they’re just trying to help with an oil change!
Getting sketchy with it
From here, I sketched out a few ways this escalation feature could work, and how our users could utilized a filter search to find the right specialist for them. Once I decided on how those features should look and behave (and visualized them through sketching out a wireframe), I designed the mid-fidelity prototype!
Further iteration needed!
Through testing, it seemed that (thankfully, phew!) the app, overall, worked as expected. There was definitely room for iteration and growth, however; users were particularly confused by the payment. Did they pay before, after, was their payment info already decided upon? The user's location on the map also needed to be added, and clarity for some of the buttons could be improved.
I hope to return to this project one day and implement these changes!
Wanna connect?
Go ahead. I don't bite.