Home | Cart
Home Cart mobile app is a marketplace where homeowners can avail home services at their fingertips.
​
Our platform provides a seamless booking experience, easy-to-understand pricing, responsive customer service and an additional guarantee on all work.
Empathize
Problem Space
Since the pandemic began it forced small businesses to close doors some temporarily other permanently.
Since then home owners are finding it difficult to get access of essential services such as electrician, plumber, carpenter, beautician etc. Homeowners are looking for affordable prices and at their convenience.
The Design question
How might we provide home owners, with home services they need in a efficient manner to save time and money?
Constraints
- Building a trustworthy relationship between customer and service provider.
- Safety of both the parties
- Connectivity (wifi)
- Online payments (having a credit card)
Opportunities
- Predetermined prices for home owners
- More jobs
- Controlled prices
Research Insights
To gain more information on my problem space, I conducted five one-on-one interviews. My questions were open-ended so that I could dig deep to uncover individual pain points, motivations, and behaviors. The interviews found four common themes, with people knowing the importance of a good service.
Emily Parker
Meet Emily parker, she is a
marketing lead in a Startup
company based in Toronto, ON.
She enjoys spending time with
her family, she has been working
from home since the pandemic.
She is busy between home and
family, she gets busy with the
daily chores.
Goals
- to obtain home services with a
peace of mind.
- to get efficient services.
Pain points
- finds it difficult to find reliable
service
- wastes too much time browsing
through the internet looking for
service providers.
Behaviour
- Likes to get things done on time
(punctual)
- Busy work Schedule
- Spends time reading online reviews on services
‘For me flexibility and getting things
done on time is important’
Ideate
Design Intervention
I created user stories to help me identify tasks that my digital solution could perform for users. After grouping these user stories into several epics, I selected the main task, which I began ideating a solution for.
​
Wireframing and Prototyping




Two rounds of user testing and iterations were completed with the greyscale prototypes. This process was a massive reality check on the importance of not designing solely based on my own intuition. Test participants found many of Home Cart's elements confusing to navigate.
Visual Identity
Approaching Home Cart's visual identity I wanted to make it user friendly, simple and elegant.
Moodboard
Keeping the target persona in mind, I wanted the feel of the app to be warm, safe, inviting and easy to use.
Branding
I wanted to name the application something that alluded to the ‘Home’ as it it is focusing on the ‘Home owners’, therefore I settled on ‘Home Cart’
​
My keywords were
Trustworthy, Choices, availability, savings, flexibility.
Logo and Typeface
​
I experimented with a few different designs to select the best design that suits Home Cart's branding image.
​
I chose Red Hat Text, Its elegant and demonstrates confidence.
Brand Color
Keeping my user personas in mind I wanted the feel of the app to be comforting, relaxing, and independence, I decided to go on with Purple as primary color, it represents reliability, independence, royalty and devotion.
Putting it all together..
Introducing Home|Cart
HI FI Prototype
​
After completing 3 rounds of grayscale wireframes and prototype.
I did a total of 2 rounds of usability testing before reaching my final protoytpe.
Notable features of the app
​
- Users can earn loyalty points everytime they request a service.
- Once the users have earned points they can use those points instead of money.
- Bookings can be modified.
- Users have a profile with ratings and other information.
- Price comparisons, users have more independence to select therefore controlled rates.
- Loyalty points earned upon referrals to friends and family
Next Steps
This project was an excellent learning experience for me to apply the skills that I had gained from BrainStation. Now that the program is complete, I plan to continue to refine my skills as a UX designer by:
​
-
Develop other task flows in the app based on previously made user stories
-
Conduct user testing on my target market with each subsequent iteration
-
Gain feedback from peers as I continue my journey as a UX designer.
Reflections
My time at BrainStation has been a challenging journey, but ultimately a validating one. When I entered this course, I was unaware and scared as I made a career change. But learning the process and tools, executing this project and others, and getting honest feedback from my educators and peers has made me believe I can do this, and I will.