Zyyah
Home Management App
UX/UI design lead
2020 - 2021
Zyyah set out to redefine home management by creating an all-in-one mobile app for new and veteran homeowners. Our team conceptualized and built several experiences for the Zyyah Home app: smart home inventory management, bot-assisted home maintenance, home coverage analysis, and insurance plan shopping.
Research and Process
Personas, Empathy Mapping, and the User Journey
We focused in on 2 realistic personas that represented our ideal customers: Chuck (a 52-year old husband and father of two girls) and Ruby (a 37-year old living in the suburbs with her husband and two young children). We detailed their goals and frustrations as homeowners, and listed out important aspects of their personality, their motivations, and their technology affinities.
We documented each persona's empathy map and user journey. We agreed on what each persona would think, feel, hear, see, say and do, as well as their pains and gains. These details helped us formulate user journeys for each persona that would guide our product strategy moving forward. We imagined how Chuck and Ruby would discover the product, what questions they would ask, happy moments and pain points during each phase of their use of the product, the opportunities they might discover along the way, and the potential business barriers for us to keep in mind.
Competitive Research and Analysis
The business identified 2 direct competitors and 4 indirect competitors they wanted to know more about. I took the lead on researching each of those product experiences and documenting and presenting our analysis. We learned each competitor company's purpose, when they were founded, how well they were funded, revenue streams, traffic, their product's advantages and disadvantages, and more.
Product Research and Strategy
We used Usertesting.com to conduct targeted surveys and interviews, asking respondents what was most important to them about being a homeowner, what they needed help with most, and how they would use a tool like Zyyah. A majority of homeowners we surveyed (over 80%) wanted help with home maintenance, and stated they would feel empowered if they had a way to do it themselves. Most respondents also wanted a better understanding of their home insurance and how to use it. Learning how homeowners viewed their world and their role in homeownership was vital in the success of our product and user experience work that followed.
Design Output
Early Design Phases
We began by establishing the app's information architecture (IA) and trying out different wireframes and low-fidelity layouts.
Know your home
Zyyah's primary mission is to give users a 360-degree view of their home and everything in it, and help them make sure everything's in perfect working order and properly protected. We understood from our research that homeowners were in need of guidance for managing their home, so we built an onboarding experience that helped them take action quickly.
Smart home inventory
A core discovery we made was that homeowners had difficulty keeping track of just how valuable their valuables were, and whether or not they were actually covered by their insurance policy. So, we built a guided, camera + machine-learning-enabled experience for users to quickly and easily inventory each room in their home to better understand their level of risk.
Coverage analysis and insurance shopping
A clear driver of revenue in the home business is insurance, and it was of course a focus of the business at Zyyah. We designed a coverage analysis and insurance buying experience that utilized our smart home inventory and harmonized with the other great features of the Zyyah Home app.
Bot-assisted home maintenance
We also learned that homeowners had a deep desire to be their own handyman - they felt empowered by DIY - so we designed a bot-assisted maintenance experience for the stuff that doesn't have to be left just to the pros.
Learnings
This project reinforced for me how critical it is to include the user every step of the way - through research, testing, iteration, and more testing. The users and respondents we leaned on throughout the process were the most critical piece of our success when we approached every new problem or feature. I learned that by staying closely connected to the users I was designing for, it allowed me to walk in their shoes daily and gave me a lot of motivation to do well for the real people who would end up experiencing my designs.
If I could go back and start the project over, I would want to lean more into the intelligent app features we were creating such as the smart home inventory, and chatbot assisted maintenance. What we were able to design was somewhat limited by the business goals and technology, and I think we could have delivered some really impressive cutting-edge experiences with a little more time and investment. I was especially passionate about the bot-assisted maintenance experience, something users asked for frequently to help them with DIY home maintenance. I would love to explore that further someday.
