Our company was chosen to design & build a brand new progressive web application for a national home builder. They wanted to create an online portal for customers to track build progress & manage their tasks (to-do list). Our client had never been exposed to UX research before, so they had to be guided throughout the project to understand the value it provides. This project also had to be done 100% remotely due to the pandemic.

My Role
As the lone researcher on the project, my first responsibility was to provide my internal team a foundational understanding of the entire homebuilding process from both the customer & employee perspectives to inform initial concept directions. Next, I planned and facilitated a usability study to inform design decisions prior to the release of our MVP. To inform future releases, I co-created customer 'tasks' & realistic content with employees, and then evaluated the design of the task lists with customers.  

Objectives
Our internal team needed to gain a solid understanding of the entire end-to-end home building service, as well as challenges employees face. At first, the senior executives we were working with were skeptical about talking to employees because they believed that they knew exactly how everything worked in their company. However, I was able to convince them to allow us to conduct some stakeholder interviews just in case they had some knowledge gaps (they did).

Methodology
I facilitated 5 group interview sessions with employees from each part of the organization: sales, design, construction, financing, and closing. I built employee journeys in real-time using Miro while sharing my screen & facilitating the conversation. I invited my internal team and the client team to listen to these conversations so that our entire working team shared the same foundational understanding of the home-building process.

Objectives
Our foundational customer research informed the design of our MVP, but now we needed to test the usability of the designs before the development team started building components. We also needed to explore customers' preferences about notifications & devices.

Methodology
We recruited 12 participants with mixed demographics who had purchased a home within the past 6 months. I had everyone download GoToMeeting on their phones prior to the session so that we could simulate them using the site on their phone without any technical difficulties. I collaborated with our visual designer to create a clickable prototype in Figma that covered 7 key scenarios.

I moderated individual usability sessions by providing them 7 task-based scenarios that were most critical to a good experience. Once again, I invited our visual designer and team lead to observe the sessions, and we had debriefs after each day.

Lastly, I created a survey to measure customers' preferences about notifications on different devices, as well as notification frequency.
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Outcomes
We found quite a few issues with our MVP, so I collaborated with our team lead and visual designer to quickly iterate on our designs to bake in the customer feedback. The survey also informed decisions about how to customize notification preferences.

Objectives
The last round of research was to ensure that we nailed the design of the customer 'task list'. We incorporated the ideas and content generated from the employee co-design sessions into a clickable prototype.

Methodology
We recruited 12 participants with mixed demographics who had purchased a home within the past 6 months. I collaborated with our visual designer to create a clickable prototype in Figma that covered 7 key scenarios.

I moderated individual usability sessions by providing them 7 task-based scenarios with realistic 'tasks' they would have to complete during their home building process. Once again, I invited our visual designer and team lead to observe the sessions, and we had debriefs after each day.
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Outcomes
This study led to tons of discussion with our client executive team. Basically, we learned that customers expected the system to notify them when a task was marked complete. However, this was not feasible today due to poor business processes that lead to inaccurate data in backend systems. Because of this research, they decided to change & enforce new business processes in order to create a 'task list' that matched customers' expectations.