Background

Nationwide owns a website called Home Journey Guide, which helps homeowners manage their homes. Specifically, users can get personalized guidance while seeing what maintenance tasks should be regularly performed and which projects can increase their home value.

Stakeholder Conversations

I organized several conversations with key stakeholders to define study goals and objectives, proposed a research plan, and establish touch bases to ensure continuous stakeholder-researcher alignment. Stakeholders were also invited to participant interviews to ensure they were involved with every step of research.

Goals

The goal of this study was to obtain feedback on high-fidelity mock-ups of home maintenance dashboard, landing page, and details page.

Objectives

• Determine perception of jobs-to-be-done, value, and support presented in the mock-ups
• Determine participant engagement and motivation with concepts presented in the mock-ups
• Identify areas for improvement within the concept
• Understand homeowner habits, delighters, and pain points surrounding home maintenance to ensure precedence with previous rounds of research

Methodology

This study was broken into two parts: First, I facilitated an in-depth interview to maximize information yield. Then, participants evaluated a high-fidelity website design via monadic testing. General population participants were recruited from User Interviews. Participants were required to be between the ages of 25-45 and own a single family home. Participants were interviewed one-on-one in one-hour sessions hosted on Zoom.

Synthesis and Analysis

Over the course of one week, participant responses were submitted to a thematic analysis. I also incorporated notes taken in Figma by observing members of my team. I chose this method to address the generative nature of this project by identifying high-level themes.

Results

Overall, my thematic analysis revealed perceived value and desirability of the high-fidelity website designs are high. Breaking up lengthy calls to action from the old website into individual tasks provided a pleasant perception of the experience. However, specific [redacted] components on the presented pages led to confusion.

Recommendations

I provided several recommendations around setting better expectations regarding participant flow to reduce confusion and better align with journey mental models. Additionally, I suggested parsing out information in several areas of the website to improve flow and readability.

Collaboration

This project was a collaborative effort across several disciplines. I received feedback from project management, marketing, technology leads, and business leads during research planning. After analyzing the results of the study, I communicated the findings back to each respective discipline to ensure the human-centered insights I uncovered were incorporated into the build and promotion of the Nationwide Home Journey Guide app pages. I also helped prepare a report on how user-centric product decisions have been. Finally, I have continued to partner with these individuals across the intervening weeks to drive meaningful change into the product.

Shareout & Impact

Results and recommendation were delivered to product stakeholders, managers, designers, and developers via Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote. I also hosted several working sessions to ensure research recommendations were incorporated into design creation. As this project is still in flight, this round of research was the first of many that may ultimately lead to improved homeowner satisfaction and decrease in customer claims.