Virtual Design Center
My Role
Product Designer
UX Researcher
Team
Siyang Ye
Silin He
Contribution
Secondary Research
User Interview
Ideate
Prototype
High-fidelity prototype
Duration
4 weeks for research
2 weeks for ideation
6 weeks for design and iteration
Tools
Figma
ProtoPie
OVERVIEW
01 Design Challenge
When building new houses for customers, The housebuilder holds a Design Center
(usually, it's offline) to exhibit their upgraded showrooms for customers, it is a place where new home buyers get to choose their upgraded materials and finishes during the house construction process.
However, customers may face many challenges in the Design Center: the confusing and overwhelming process of selecting different items, the back, and forth revision, and concerns for the final outcome.
How can we create a design center to make it easier for the customers to better select items for their new homes and make confident decisions?
02 Design Response
We proposed to build a virtual design center as a complementary part of the offline one, helping new homebuyers make more efficient and confident choices.
Feature One
AI-enpowered auto upgrade based on preference survey
Feature Two
Real-time rendering visualizes style-related substitutes
Feature Three
Overall selection list to help offline visits.
03 Design Process
The design process consists of four phases: 1. Research, 2. Ideation, 3. development & iteration. Throughout primary and secondary research we defined our design questions and narrowed the scope of the design in order to get an ideal design outcome within the given time. After that, we spent months iterating our design, and by designing products, we’ve grown a deeper understanding of what design problems we should focus on exactly to improve the customer experience at the design center.
RESEARCH
01 Secondary
Research
How Current Design Center Works
Design center is a place where builders provide one-step house upgrading services to the customers. New home buyers, builders, and sales consultants are the three main stakeholders.
Before moving into a new home, the buyer will be offered a handbook of items waiting to be chosen from the design center, which includes materials, finishes, lighting, cabinets, etc. They will be going through all the items with the help of the sales consultant in the design center tour and may finalize their decision after several visitings. After all the upgrading items are set, the builder will complete the interior construction following the buyer’s selection.
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From this basic research, we think the design center process is inefficient. One possible pain point would be that buyers can’t visualize their selection, so they have to go back and forth to the design center several times to make final decisions.
Competitor Analysis
Due to Covid, we were not able to conduct research with local vendors. Instead, we did a competitive analysis for online platforms We figured out what are the must-have features and the special features differ from others, coming up with the conclusion that most online design centers allow customers to choose and change singular pieces freely, however, none of them support the customer changing items based on overall/ preferred styles, and we think this can lead to customer frustration or back and forth effort.
02 Primary
Research
From the secondary research, we got the hypothesis that new home buyers need smarter style recommendations and instant visualization of their choices. So in order to get more detailed insight, we interviewed four people who once bought a new house from a housebuilder and had the experience of the design center process. All of them have visited the design center more than twice.
To better draw the insight from our interview, we used a user journey map to map out all the pain points that the interviewees mentioned.
We generated three insights:
03 Insights
01
Homebuyers find it hard to visualize the effect of choices and wonder what will be the final result.
This is aligned with the previous hypothesis that homebuyers need instant visualization to make confident choices. In addition, from the interview, we also found interviewees cared about the instant price after they made upgrading.
“
I couldn’t picture the image in my mind once I made decisions, so I was always stuck in several options and have no idea about how the room would look after construction...
- William Wang, Software Engineering
02
Homebuyers care about unified style and prefer a whole set of recommendations.
Although Interviewees couldn’t precisely describe their preferred style with words, they want their upgrading to be fitted into one style. Also, two interviewees mentioned that they were always unconfident about whether the individual revision of items can fit with the overall style.
“
Buying a whole set of the showroom is usually helpful because all the items can match with each other...
- Cymila Cheng, UX designer
03
To be more efficient, a clarified selection list is helpful before the design center tour.
Three of the interviewees mentioned that although the housebuilder sent them the selection list in advance, it’s impossible to complete a clarified version before the design center tour. In the end, they only had a draft list to meet with the sales consultant, which barely helped. They had to schedule the appointment several times to finalize the list.
“
There was nothing to discuss upon with the sales consultant on the first visit....
- Lihui, accountor
After this, we make our design goal clearer:
How might we design a virtual design center which could help new home buyers select upgrades and visualize the spatial effects so that they can finalize the selection list confidently?
04 Persona
To better understand the target users, we generated persona
IDEATE
01 Brainstorming and Finalized Idea
We brainstormed 23 solutions for the virtual design center and picked three main features to develop after voting and thorough discussions because we think those are the key features that lower the difficulties for customers to make decisions. AI auto upgrading based on preference survey; Real-time rendering visualizes style-related substitutes; Generating overall selection list to help offline visit.
02 Rethink User Flow
Based on the final idea, the virtual design center can serve as the auxiliary tool before the new homebuyer’s first visit to the offline design center, making the process more efficient and enjoyable. Or, it can serve as a great alternative when the homebuyers are not able to visit Design Center in person, especially under the influence of COVID.
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03 Storyboard
Reimagining the experience of new house upgrading.
PROTOTYPE
01 Initial Design
As the finalized idea informed, we produced the initial design following three main features: AI auto upgrading based on preference survey; Real-time rendering visualizes style-related substitutes; Generating the overall selecrtion list to help offline visit.
Feature One
Feature Two
Feature Three
02 Iteration
To test our initial design concept, we made prototypes and conducted the online test with the previous four interviewees, generating four main feedbacks to improve our design. Insights we got from the tastings are:
01
Make the cumbersome process more guidable
“
I was a bit lost about what I should do for the next step
-William Wang
We added the processing bar on the top and highlighted the ongoing tasks, so the user will feel safer about where they are heading to, what they are doing, and what has been done.
02
A more integrated style recommendation system to shorten user flow
“
I was confused because after I filled out the style preference survey of a certain room, I still have to choose a preferred set of this room from many collocations
-Cymila Cheng
Instead of surveying users’ preferred style of each individual room and offer recommendations for every room, we simplified this to their overall taste of the whole house. By doing this, users will get a completed selection plan after submitting the survey, so that reduce redundant work.
03
Strengthen the connection between the selected item list and its visualization
“
It would be good if I can see all the selected materials together with the rendering interface
-Lihui
We parallel the selected items list with the visualization interface, and they change synchronously if the user replaces items.
04
Use the welcoming color palette
“
I kinda feel like the color is too serious to chill people down of this already overwhelmed work
-Leo Ni
We use orange as the main color to make the overall atmosphere of the interface more lively and welcoming.
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03 Finalized Design
After the iteration, we landed our virtual design center on a more guidable, automatic, and integrated step-by-step experience.
Step One
Basic Information Input
Step Two
Chose base style to get upgrading plans
Step Three
Edit individual items by rooms
Step Four
Review the selection list
Step Five
Schedule a visit
REFLECTION
01 Takeaway
01 Narrow down design scope. Be aware of the time limit and prioritize the design problems. When the project scope is broad, we have a lot of fascinating ideas we want to realize, but with finite time, we have to decide what’s the biggest design problems and dedicate most of our time to them. In this project, we have agreed that we should focus on the specific user experience of how they choose the whole package in the selection list, instead of other parts of the whole upgrading and construction process.
02 Design is not a linear process. We have learned that sometimes former research/ design conclusions are refined by later ones. Even as a fresh starter in UX, we are familiar with the design process which usually consists of 4 stages: 1. Research, 2. Ideation, 3. development &4. iteration. However, only till we start doing a project, we learned that the 4 processes are not a linear development, it’s more like a cycle: at first, we want to make some changes to the current design center experience, however, we only specify the problem with the coming research. Even the development process helps us become more aware of the design problem we want to solve.
02 Next Step
01 Further develop more product features to help users make easier decisions to better select items for their new homes. During the research and interview, we have learned many frustrations the customers are faced with making decisions, we now mainly developed our ‘visualization’ function to give customers a real touch of how their choices will look like. Next time we want to develop a ‘compare’ function to assist the customers better. This new function will allow users to save different upgrade plans and see/compare the visualized effects of those multiple sets at the same time.
02 Consider other stakeholders’ needs in our design. Due to the time and budget limit in this self-oriented project, our project only focuses on how to improve the customer’s experience by choosing their upgrade plans for their new homes. However, the real process consists of other stakeholders, including contractors, builders, designers….and fully satisfying their needs is also vital, so we hope we can develop our designs that work well for those stakeholders if possible.
