Visuel AI, Design Sprint
UX Designer • 5 days • Figma, Photoshop, Google Meet, Pen & Paper
Decorating your new home environment is tough. People wanting to update their homes face numerous roadblocks. Decision anxiety, and price confusion drive user behaviors making the shopping experience a sometimes negative one. Visuel aims to address this with AI enabled home decoration recommendations pulled from our list of suppliers.
Timing
5 days
Problem Context
How might we make it easier for users seeking to shop for home decor?
How do we help users find product that will look good in their spaces?
How do we help users prioritize what products they need for home decoration?
Deliverables
Research informed MVP
Clickable Figma prototypes
7 in depth interviews with various participants
Final case study documenting the process
Day 1: Understand
I reviewed the existing research provided by House2Home, the company looking to design a new product for. This included interviews, user personas, and usability tests. I was then able to synthesize this research and began to map out potential steps a user might follow on the platform to help users find their ideal home decor.
Research Highlights
After reviewing the rerserach materials and interviews I found a few main themese emerging..
Decision paralysis: Users confronted with a big catalog of home decor choices can feel overwhelmed. The sheer amount of options can de-incentivize would be buyers.
Its hard to visualize it in my space: The way products are presented online is detached from users actual spaces. Consistenty heard was the idea of “I wish I could see how objects look in my own space”
Cost prioritization: Shoppers would have issues determining what the best or most effective first item to purchase would be. Would this dining table be the most bang for my buck or should i start with small accent piece
I then drafted some initial jobs to be done I knew I wanted to target with whatever solution I came up with during this sprint.
User Persona
After my initial research phase I then created a user persona that I thought was exemplary of the comments I heard that I could use to benchmark my design ideas. Below you can find my most critical persona I used for validation.
Experience Mapping
Now that I had a decent understanding of the user and created a persona that I could use as a benchmark I began the process of mapping what I thought could be the possible end to end experience for a user. I settled upon really trying to target the problem of users not being able to understand how objects would work in their space by creating an AI system that helps users visualize furniture in their own spaces before buying.
Day 2: Sketch
My second day of the sprint was focused on sketching. On this day I conducted lightning demos, pulling out inspiration of other similar products or products that I thought I could leverage interesting interactions. After that I started ideating on various screens in my end to end experience to start detailing how that interaction would play out.
Sketches
Initial sketch ideation was focused on quickly thumbnailing out some of the key features to get the ideas on paper. Testing edge cases, reach ideas and ironing out some of the design kinks to get thoughts on paper.
Refinement
After the intitial sketch ideas I set about trying to pinpoint specific features and building the corresponding screens before and after that. This gave me kind of a mini flow that I would use in the storyboarding phase of my project.
Day 3: Storyboarding & decide
On day 3 I took my rough sketches and translated them into lofi prototypes so i had a really good idea of the relative flow of my design and what featurese I had not gone deep enough in on my sketch phase.
Storyboards
I created a lofi wireframe based directly on a 7 frame sketch storyboard to lay out the most important red route experience I wanted to create for users of my product. I decided to rebrand the AI portion of the house to home app to Visuel at this point, calling attention to the way it helps users visualize their spaces.
Day 4: Prototypes & refinement
On day 4 I refinemed the storyboarded mockups I did in the previous day, translating them to higher fidelity and ironing out some of the feature kinks I noticed while building out my initial storyboards. I also took the time today to hook the wireframe up to create a clickable prototype that I would be using on day 5 to test.
Hifi Mockups
A sample of the screens in my hifi mockups showing a few of the main interaction areas of my app. Interactions focused on uploading and creating your prompt, viewing projects, and checkout.
Day 5: Testing & Validation
On day 5 I conducted usability tests for my Hifi Mockups and calaogued areas where users had errors or issues using the app. I then took these findings and further refined my mockups.
Testing Highlights
From my testing experience I found that the product idea of using AI to visualize and recommend products for your space was a sought after feature and recieved a lot of positive impressions on the general idea.
Below are some interesting highlights from user testing. I used this feedback to update and refine the design.
Project Learnings
This short 5 day exercise really tested my abilities as a UX designer to iterate quickly and effectively. My background as a designer in the agency world lended well to this pace and now with this short burst I have the learnings to further refine this concept in a second sprint. Distilling a product down to its most elemental MVP can sometimes be as challenging as building out a more complex variation.