TheManHome

 

As $10B interior design industry becomes more popular in among men, TheManHome establishes their MVP to add taste to empty man caves.

 
 
 
 

My Role

Working with the founding team, I lead the design of TheManHome’s MVP across desktop and responsive products from the beginning of the project in mid 2016. As design assets were handed off for development in late 2016, I supported their progress through the initial cycle.

User Discovery

I worked alongside one founder and two product managers to discover how our market behaves in order to make smart decisions on overall scope and feature sets.

MVP Scope

After better understanding our users, I was able to incorporate business goals to plan a features that would accomplish high-priority tasks for TMH and users alike.

Design Execution

I completed flows, sketches, wireframes, and prototypes to ensure the final product reflected a simple and intuitive experience relevant to our user goals.

 

Our Challenge

As many traditional services move on-demand, companies in the design-services space have become increasingly interested in leveraging technology to complete manual tasks. Our challenge was to enter an existing interior design space that targets men.

TheManHome will offer avenue for men to transform their spaces into a home of pride and self expression.

 
 
 
 

Our Approach

TheManHome MVP will connect individuals looking to design their spaces, to in-house designers who will curate unique design solutions for each customer. The concept was to take the current manual process of interior design and streamline it through one tool online.

 
 
 
 

Discovery - Time, Accessibility, and Decision Making

Initial product-market-fit research was conducted through surveying and user interviews to better understand our male-seeking interior design market. Interviews established the following difficulties in the traditional design process where the client feels:

 

Overloaded with Furniture Options

Individuals looking to design their own space often become overloaded with the options available to them and have difficulty making those decisions alone.

 

Difficulty Selecting a Designer

Men often struggle with beginning their search for an interior designer. Where to look, and what to look for is often too challenging.

 

Too Busy for Collaboration

Busy lifestyles with social and work engagements make it difficult for clients to find and schedule time to meet with their designers.

 

Difficulty Imagining Designs

Clients find it difficult to make design choices based on the moodboard assets that designers provide.

 
 
 

Meet TheManHome


TheManHome helps men transform their home. Clients are paired with designers, guided through the design process, and given the option to purchase items at their convenience.

 
 
 
 

Onboard Your Space

Clients onboard their room(s) and are taken through steps to select their room type, style preference, design package, room details and final payment.

 
 
 
 

Collaborate on Design

Designers collaborate with clients to make sure the final delivery contains the preferred aesthetic and feel. Clients communicate with designers through chat and revision based furniture selection.

 
 
 
 

Choose When to Purchase

Once final designs are approved, the client shopping cart becomes available for checkout. The client can select to purchase as many of the items they wish to purchase.

 
 
 

 
 

UX PROCESS

How We Got There

Personas for designer and client were made to keep our team focused on solving key user pain points. These personas were constantly referenced when making key product decisions during ideation and design implementation.

 
 
 
 

Selecting Features, Avoiding Scope Creep

By establishing a feature set early in the UX process, we were able to avoid scope creep and focus on features that solve pain points for our designers and clients. Development teams were involved in the decision making process to evaluate the effort v impact of each feature in consideration.

 
 
 
 

Traditional Interior Design Process On-Demand

An initial IA map was produced to understand the relationship between the various pieces of the product structure. User flows were created to help our team to better visualize paths and outcomes associated with each selected feature.

 
 
 
 

From Low to High-Fidelity

Sketching during product meetings allowed our team to iterate on ideas of the look and feel of layout and functionality. Initial meetings resulted in the selection of a dashboard experience with the goal of mimicking the traditional process of Interior Design. Sketches were then wireframed and tested with both designers and clients to collect feedback through task scenarios. After user feedback was presented to the stakeholders, we began to iterate on the design to help solve flows that were less intuitive to our test users.

 
 
 
 

VISUAL DESIGN & BRANDING

Comfortable UI for the Modern Man

I began User Interface design by first looking closer at similar products used by our persona in the design space to understand popular and common visual elements used by competitors. I also assembled a moodboard of lifestyle images common to our market.

 
 
 
 

These exercises inspired a simple grayscale color palette that reflects sophistication and simplicity. The selection of Raleway typeface was chosen to exhibit simplicity an edge of personality to the copy. Landing and detail screens were designed with full bleed images to spark interest upon first visit. When designing the interface, we made sure to approach elements with a modular-first mindset in order to keep functionality and elements consistent for responsive design.

 
 
 
 

Final Thoughts & Steps Ahead

User Discovery helped our team gain insight and better perspective on the designer-client relationship, and developed our systematic understanding of the interior design process. Pain points extracted from interviews became our focus when selecting features for the MVP. Once the product is live, testing will be very important to evaluate the effectiveness of major features. Initial user interviews, task scenarios and general feedback will be extremely important to ensure the product does not deviate from its purpose.