Block Renovation Discovery and Mobile Design

I was the Principal Designer on two phases with our client, Block Renovation. Substantial engaged with Block to launch a new MVP product that would allow bathroom renovations to start at a significantly lower price, specifically targeting millennial homeowners. This meant changes to the customer facing website, as well as new features and UX improvements to the contractor facing native application.

Find the case study on Substantial’s website here.

Discovery phase

First, I led the initial discovery and strategic phase of research and user validation, where we worked side by side with Block Renovation to push their concept into reality. I led a team of two designers and two technologists as we dove into building a systematic map of their processes, stakeholder interviews, contractor user interviews and customer interviews — ultimately to develop estimates and a roadmap for building their vision in the next phase.

Below are the system maps for understanding the connection of services at Block and the user journey we created to represent where the MVP product would connect to the system.

I then led the internal and external team through refining the map to only include the happy path for MVP, which we would build and launch in phase 2. Below is the path and the prioritization matrix we used for determining the estimates for building and to only plan for must-have features based on the timeline and scope.

Principal Designer on the design + build phase

We paired with Block Renovation to turn the initial strategy comprising a multi-user digital collaborative ecosystem between contractor and consumer into an MVP launch in less than four months.

I was the Principal Designer on this work supporting and coaching two product designers through the engagement, ensuring the client’s needs were being met along with tracking the quality standards for the product design, verifying our designs integrated seamlessly into the design system already created at Block, supporting the user feedback process and synthesis, and keeping the design team on track.

Below are some designs created for the mobile experience.

Client workshop

As a final sync before MVP launch, I ran a pre-mortem working session with the client team to understand what we might encounter upon release of MVP. This helped the external team gain alignment on what the MVP was going to be, plan for any for issues we saw beforehand and build consensus on the release.

User journey as a process tool

The full user journey for MVP, including contractor and customer touchpoints, was finalized at the end of the engagement. I felt the client and internal team needed to see the full user journey paired with the final designs in order to understand the entirety of the flow and what was still work in progress.

I supported the lead designer in building out the below journey. We used this as a way of updating the client on in-progress work and as a final artifact upon the closing of the engagement.