Local Pro App - Direct Jobs

Role: UX Design Strategist

Timeline: 8 weeks

Tools: Miro, Sketch

Platform: iOS, Android

Background

The Local Pro app connects contractors with Home Depot to receive job referrals from local customers. As part of this, the Local Pro Transact initiative was launched to facilitate job connections with a fixed market rate. This project has four phases:

1. Account Creation: Contractors sign up to become a "Local Pro" in the app.

2. Invitation: Eligible contractors are invited to enroll in the "Direct Jobs" benefit.

3. Using: Contractors can receive new jobs, manage their schedules, communicate with customers, and get paid through the app.

4. Online Consumer Experience: Consumers can add "Local Pro Service" to their cart along with Home Depot products.

This case study focuses on Phase 2, the Invitation experience, which invites eligible contractors to join the "Direct Jobs" program.

• Promote the new “Direct Job” features and entice Pros to join

• The enrollment has to be very simple to go through, and the benefits needs to be easily scannable and understood

• Business requirements need a way to get Pros to agree to disclose their payment range and average hours depending on the specific job

Tasks and Challenges

My Involvement

Planning and Scope Definement

Collaborated with stakeholders like business, product, engineering and legal to identify and refine the scope of work. Planned strategically to outline scope of work for each phase in order to work in an agile enviroment.

Research and Facilitation

Planned and facilitated design sprints to kickstart the UX side of the project.

Experience Strategy and Vision

The key challenge was to plan and execute each and every phase without overwhelming the team due to the number of unknowns. I developed careful strategic planning and time management and guided each team members accordingly to walk through each phase.

Oversight and Coordination

I led the efforts and was in charge of communicating with all the stakeholders. For the design effort, I delegated the UI and UX designers to develope the intended mocks and prototypes, while I also collaborated with UX researcher to develop usability scripting for the moderated user tests.

Scope of Work

• Design Sprint Planning and Facilitating

• Task Flows

• Information Architecture

• Moderated Usability Test Scripting (with UX Researcher)

• Synthesizing Usability Test Findings (with UX Researcher)

• Coordination with legal and copy writer

• Coordination with marketing, legal and business side

• Overseeing design mocks and prototype deliverables (with UX and UI Designers)

• QA with engineering after launch

The Results

• 4 stars improvement rating on Google App Store (from 2.8 stars previously)

• 200+ new sign ups from Local Pro within the first month of release

Overview of Design Process

This project tackles the phase 2 of the Local Pro App, which is “Invitation”

Design Sprint

Overall Information

  • Preparation and Facilitator: Me

  • Participants (stakeholders): Engineers, Product manager, Business Analyst, Legal, UX Researcher, UX

  • Designers, Copy writer

  • Duration: 2 days

Content

  1. Opportunity

  2. Overall ask

  3. What is and is not in scope

  4. Competitor analysis

  5. How might we questions

  6. Participant sketches + voting round

Competitive Benchmarking

With the limitations of not having an actual business number or business insurance number, I tried to research on the invitation/enrollment stage of competitor apps as best I could. I reviewed both the customer facing and contractor facing experience to get the most thorough details, up until a business number or payment was required.

Ideation Sketches and Dot Voting

This exercise sketches should consist the experience to:

  • Introduce the benefits of Local Pro Transact

  • Capture Banking Information

  • Capture the Local Pro’s Services

  • Capture a profile picture

  • A survey that asks for what the user’s honest opinion of their occupation’s market rate (with a capped range)

Dot Voting Results:

After the dot voting ended, I arranged all the sketches in terms of requirements, and looked at areas that received votes. By organizing this way, the UX team can holistically look at all the needed steps with areas of opportunity and concerns.)

Iteration - Translating Sprint Findings into Wireframes

Concerns and Challenges:

The biggest concern was how to display the survey to ask users what they believe their occupation’s average market rate is, and what they believe certain services durations are with a capped range as per business requirement.

Version 1

  • Hides the capped range until the user makes the conscious effort to make enough clicks

  • However a lot of clicks will be needed if the default has a large gap compared to desired answer

Version 2

  • No matter what the input is, it will only require 1 slide

  • Downside is presenting the minimum and maximum out right (business wants to avoid this)

  • Depending on how big the range is, the slider may become very sensitive

Decision and Justification

  • Stakeholders and UX team decide to go with Version 1 using the stepper since we will not show the entire range, and every dollar increase/decrease will be a conscious thought.

  • The user can also click the input box and enter their desired number right away if it is farther from the default number

User Testing

A prototype was created for a moderated usability test for this project. An email was sent to a list of Local Pros signed up with Home Depot with a 4 or above star ratings. Each participant was in a 1 hour session with the UX researcher, with the UX team sitting in on the background as the test went on.

Test Objectives

  • Findability on locating the new feature

  • Usability on completing the form

  • Understanding all the questions requiring an input

Test Results Summary

  • Overall no major issues on the findability or usability

  • A lot of concerns over how the app will charge VS the reality of a contractor job

    • A good number of contractors we tested do not charge per hour

    • A lot of variable changes how a job should charge, but the app does not take that in consideration

    • Suggestion on setting one price with updates VS hourly (this is to be considered for the next phase)

Final Solution

The final product was released on the Local Pro App that is available on both Apple and Google Play Store

Results and Reflection

KPIs

4 stars

Improvement Rating

From 2.8 stars to 4 stars on Google Play Store

200+

Sign Ups from Local Pros

Within the first month of release

What could have went better and what I learned:

  • It would have been more beneficial to recruit the targeted personas amongst the entire pool of Local Pros, especially when it comes to their expectations for this new benefit (focus on a few occupations)

  • I Learned a lot about helping set context in a moderated usability test and testing script, because it matters a lot when we are trying to extract useful insights from the targeted audience through their tone, words and thoughts. When the context is set properly, insights become clearer.

Next Step

  • Due to heavy concerns of how the app will charge depending on the job itself, suggestions will be taken to consideration before the next phase of the app (How the app actually functions) begins

  • Re-mapping the business strategy with product managers and business department

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