Vy for Homebase (YC W21)
Market and Competitor Research
User Research
UX Design
UI Design
Information Architecture Design
Homebase's UX Research discovered that customers and prospective customers of Homebase's real-estate financing services found the existing website to be difficult to use and unable to display Homebase in a trustworthy light. Trust is vital in the financial services industry. During my time at Homebase, I helped the company to improve the usability of the site and revamp its look to evoke trust among its customers and prospective customers.
To gain an understanding of the problem and the company's users, I first reviewed the user interview scripts and analysis done prior to me joining the company. I then discovered that UX research activities at the time neglected a core user group - the internal users. Besides the external users (customers and prospective customers), internal users such as Marketers, Sales Reps, Product Managers, Founders,… also frequently use the website for live pitch, inquiry response, quote calculation. Oftentimes, external users learn of the website and its functionalities first through internal users' introduction.
I then set out to conduct more interviews with the aforementioned internal users to understand more of their difficulties when using the company's website. Besides qualitative data, I also consulted the website's traffic information, ads metrics and lead data to understand the general patterns of usage: where users come from, what type of devices users use, what users do on the websites, …
How we empathize
Review existing UX research reports
Review qualitative data on traffics, user activities, heatmaps
Identified a core user group that was neglected in previous research - the internal users
Outcome
Conducted more interviews with internal users (Marketers, Sales Reps, Product Managers, ...)
The aforementioned effort has lead us to define the company website's user persona: a 30-something who regards homeownership as one's life goal, instilled by their upbringing's emphasis on homeownership as a sign of success. This characterization not only represents the external but also internal users, who worked for Homebase out of the belief that homeownership should be accessible.
Having a persona defined, we have a more concrete goal to work towards: creating an experience that this specific persona would find easy to use and trustworthy.
I worked closely with engineers, product experts, marketing and management throughout the whole process of redesigning the website. As there are more than 20 pages on the websites that need rework, we started by systematically resolving fundamental issues existing in Homebase's design style that leads to issues raised by users by developing a design guideline to ensure consistent design across the website.
We started by making changes to the existing design guideline, which is quite minimal with about 11 pages, and then expand the guidelines to 30 pages in the following iteration with more detailed guidelines for graphics design and UI/UX.
The redesign of the website started with the team prioritizing pages with highest traffic and iteratively introducing updates to those using the new design guidelines. Using Figma, a new design system is also built alongside the redesign following the new guidelines.
Besides participating in redefining the UI design, I was also responsible for various UX changes, such as a new Mortgage Repayment Calculator and Contact Form. I also redesigned the Information Architecture for the company's Blog and Help Center.
As Homebase's website is a vital touchpoint with steady stream of traffic daily, the team working on this project came to the conclusion that we could not roll iteratively page by page. This is because the inconsistency might worsen untrustworthiness issues among external users. The identification of the internal group came in handy for validation of the prototype because It is much quicker, easier and less risky to bring WIPs to internal users for testing and validation.
Therefore, team decided to make a "minimum viable" version of every page for to speed up the testing to publish time. Once we were able to have all new "minimum viable" version of the whole website tested, the team published them all while a more complicated design is in development.
As it is a small startup with small design and development team, I was also involved in the implementation of design using the no-code platform Webflow.
