Houselab Nov 2018 – Jan 2019
Project
Houselab is a saas platform that assists Architects, Builders and Home Renovators with project handover, managing defects and repairs, with a digital document storage for warranties, manuals, budgets and documentation of the build.
Remote Role
UX Designer, and Project Consultant.
Brief
Branding, UX Designs, wireframes and prototype the user experience and developer documentation for handover to offshore dev team.
Tech
XD, Illustrator, InVision, Dropbox Paper .
Details
The project started as “Show my house” with designing the initial brand concept and prototype for a virtual tour of a house aimed at the realestate market. After further market research and feedback from networking in the industry the product pivoted and refined it’s focus to support the handover process of property sales.
After rebranding as “Houselab”, this new direction went through a scoping process outlining new features within the existing product. UX cycles were coordinated with the founder to work within budget constraint. These cycles were staged after each development milestone was achieved by off shore development team.
The main challenge was to streamline the user experience to simplify the complexity of managing assets of multiple properties across multiple projects. This was solved by created repeatable UI components that allowed the presentation and manipulation of information in an easy to understand fashion.
Over UX interations UI components were designed to be re-used in the various part of the systems hierarchy. This formed the foundation of a design language system that the Dev teams could problem solve with in their iterations of the product development.
Targeted mobile and tablet screens were designed alongside developer documentation to assist in guiding off shore teams in translating the main web interface into their mobile counterparts.
Reflection
Offshore development can be tricky. Communication challenges and a”work it out as you go” methodologies can create a situation, where the budget can spiral into frustration trying to deliver a bug free customer ready product.
Engaging a professional design team that understands of the limitations of technology to work closely with the C-Suite and key stakeholders can help mitigate these problems. Having clear UX/UI documentation at the start of each cycle needs to followed up by a review process for each major product milestone that involves this design team.