Handyman
App
Case Study
When hiring a handyman there are a few things to consider that some people may not realize, it may be difficult to find someone for small/odd jobs. For instance, going with a national franchise handyman can often lead to you getting a screened candidate who has a boss you can go to if there are issues. On the other hand, you may get handymen who don’t care about the quality of their work and higher costs. While a self-employed handyman will not have a national name which may lead to lower prices, but they may not be as well known or easy to find. As a team we were tasked with creating an app that would connect homeowners with tradesmen willing to pick up these odd jobs.
Here is a look at some of the pros and cons of a national franchise vs a self employed handyman.
Goal:
Our goal for this project was to create an app to connect customers with handymen in their area. We decided to create one app that housed one side for the handymen and one side for the customers.
We wanted to connect customers with reliable, competent and experienced handymen. As well as having a way to see reviews of tradesmen from other users. For the handyman side we wanted to give them a way to manage their schedules, easily communicate with customers, and keep a record of past clients.
Research:
During the research phase, we conducted competitive analysis, surveys, and interviews. We chose to do competitive research to see what other handymen apps were doing right and what customers felt was lacking in their service by reading customer reviews.
From our surveys we wanted to see if customers had ever used an app to find a handyman, how they prefer to communicate with handymen, and what were the most important factors when finding a handyman. With the handymen we wanted to see how they would like to pay for this service as it provides leads on new customers, and how they would like to communicate with users.
Both handymen and customers wanted to either be called or text about changes in schedule, so we put both options as well as messaging in our app.
During the interview phase we wanted to hear about an experience with a handyman, good or bad, and how the experience could be better or how finding a handyman could be easier. With the handymen we wanted to hear what made it difficult when doing their job, as well as what was the most common way they got clients.
Throughout our research we found some commonalities among users and this lead us to define our goal for this app to fulfill the users needs.
From our research we gleaned these commonalities:
Customer Commonalities:
- Pick a handyman from recommendations from friends or word of mouth. (Our reviews section allows users to read about others experience)
- Find all available handymen for different jobs (plumbing, painting, etc.) in one place.
- Easy way to contact and communicate with the handymen
Handymen Commonalities:
- Clean work area, and a way to notify customers of what that meant. (free of clutter & pets)
- Keep track of customers they have worked with, both good and bad.
- Keep invoices, communication, and past customer reviews all in one place.
- Easily get leads for new customers for a monthly fee rather than a percentage of profits.
The insights we gained during the research phase gave us the base to create our customer and handyman personas. The commonalities listed above were mentioned multiple times throughout the research phase and led us to create the goals for the customers and handymen. Communication and scheduling was a common issue customers and handymen had concerns about.
Customers Goal: Find a reliable and competent handyman who offered competitive rates that they could build rapport with and continue to use their handyman services.
Handyman Goal: Easily manage their schedule by blocking out available times. Clearly and easily communicate with customers about upcoming and past jobs. Have a way to easily send invoices and look through paid and unpaid invoices. Have a log of what they have done for that customer previously.
Design:
After we created our personas we began by splitting up and putting pen to paper to sketch out our ideas to create a product that helped the customers and handymen achieve their goal and provided a solution to our user. Then we came together as a team to discuss our ideas, when we came together everyone brought unique ideas of things we didn’t see in other apps that may benefit our users. Here are some of the design ideas that came from our sketches.
Design Ideas that came from sketches:
- A way for customers to compare handymen.
- A way for handymen to make a note that customers had a dog, so they were prepared for the job.
- A way to track their handyman when he is on his way and give customers an eta
- A way for handymen to see invoices of customers paid and unpaid.
When my team initially started creating our wireframes some pages were a little overwhelming and others were very bare. As we started testing we found areas where we could add some elements to pages where others we found elements that were rarely used and wasting space. Here are some things we wanted to test on our wireframes:
- The dog Icon for handymen to note customer has a dog
- The compare handymen page
- The create an invoice flow
During the user testing process, these were the most common pain points for our users.
Customers:
- The “hire” button was intimidating, so we changed it to “request service”
- The navigation bar was confusing some icons were too similar and they were too small to click
- Two places to search made it confusing
- Hierarchy of comparison page was confusing
- Looked like a dating app (color swatches)
Handymen:
- Didn’t understand the dog icon
- Navigation was confusing
- Tabs were difficult to understand (in the wireframe)
- Didn’t really have a landing page
If we had more time we would have liked to create a way for handymen to show their availability after hours and those who are available for work right now for emergency cases. I think also building out onboarding pages as well as our more menu would be something we would want to do had we been given more time to work on the project.
Prototype