Background

As a customer who has just purchased a Decorist design project, there are three phases to getting to the final result – a complete room design.

• First, the customer completes an interactive project details form where they include information about their space, interior design style, design inspiration, and budget.

• Next, they review two initial concepts or design directions their designer presents which they can then provide feedback on.

• Finally, they receive their final design, room layout, and shopping list of furniture and decor which can all be purchased on the Decorist platform.

As you might guess, the second step mentioned is where most of the actual design process happens which can involve a lot of back and forth between you and your designer to get your final design just right.

Challenge

During this part of the process, the Design Concepts phase, the user rates each of the concepts 1 to 5 stars. This gives the interior designer a better idea of which concept to move forward with or work a bit more on.

However, the details of what items or design elements the user specifically liked or didn’t like had to be communicated by messaging with your designer on the platform.

While the ability to message openly with your designer is great for initial questions and conversations, trying to describe more detailed information was inefficient and resulted in a lot of extra time spent by both the user and designer reading and writing feedback also resulting in miscommunication or things getting missed.

Goal

The product goal was to arrive at a design solution by first finding consistent behaviors between customers and their designers and designing a more efficient, systematic way to integrate them into the experience.

The business goal was to reduce the average time it took for a project to be completed by 2 days. The project completion rate was an important business objective of ours because we saw that customers would purchase more items from their design the sooner their project was completed. This would also improve the overall experience for both the customer and designer by implementing a simpler way to communicate design feedback.

Initial Research

I started by reading through our customer NPS feedback to validate the pain point we hypothesized at this point in the design process. This also led to some discovery from users about how they feel in the process, for example, sometimes users weren’t sure if they liked an item or not so they needed to see more options to help decide.

I also did some interviews with the interior designers using our platform to get their qualitative feedback and ideas which also helped to confirm how tedious it was for them to parse so much detailed feedback in an unstructured messaging format.

Design Approach

Because the interior design process takes days, it would take awhile to collect enough data to see our results, so we wanted to implement a smaller MVP to get people using it quickly.

It made sense to keep the more general design concept rating which was a huge data point for us to determine customer happiness, and add a rating step for individual products after. It seemed like a natural next step for the user to rate individual items after giving an overall rating of the design, from general to specific.

I started working on some visual flows to address our happy path and any edge cases. This allowed us to make some decisions on what we need to be addressed in the product for the MVP and what we could deprioritize for later iterations.

It was also essential to get feedback about the user experience from the main business stakeholders in this process including our interior designers.

Final Design

The new feature fit seamlessly into our current experience, since it was an additional step to the existing rating experience. This created a lot less dependencies across the platform and helped to keep engineering scope lower than forecasted.

Once the user rated both design concepts, we displayed a Continue button which would advance them to the next step in the rating process. 

Depending on which concept they rated higher, we displayed those items in a simple grid where the user could rate each by tapping a thumbs up, thumbs down, or “OK” if they were in-between. They could also leave a short comment on any item so that they could give a contextual reason or message. The expectation is that their designer would provide more options for items they didn’t like.

When they’ve finished rating the items from their preferred concept, they can also rate items from the concept that was rated lower (or the same). They can also simply skip it if they only want their designer to work with items from their preferred concept.

We found that most users like items from both and wanted to mix and match the designs.

I also included an area to leave additional feedback specific to each design. Again, just helping to centralize information and give better context to the experience.

Analysis

After shipping the feature, we spent 60 days collecting data from new projects kicking off and saw that the average time spent on a project decreased by 1.5 days. There were less messages sent during this part of the process between customers and designers and based on a quick survey, our interior designers were happier with the process and felt they were saving time spent on projects.