Launch date: Spring 2025

Role: Lead UX Designer, Technical Product Owner

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Context & Discovery.

I was approached by HouseRX founder Ron Fesko to help get them and their team back on track. They were working with a development agency which, while talented, was not able accurately capture the founder's vision when it came to the HouseRX experience - The target users, the product flow, and the general presentation. The vision for HouseRX was to create an ecosystem for home-owners and property managers to manage the health of their home at a glance with the assistance of intuitive software and a network of trusted, local technicians. When I joined the project, the current product represented more of an ad-hock scheduling software with most of the responsibility on the clients (home owners) and not enough attention given to the home managers. or the technicians.

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The original flow had almost all of the focus on the home owner, and rather than giving them their 'home at a glance', it provided them with a vague dashboard and the ability to schedule recurring home audits. Since my primary responsibility was to help center the app around the correct end-user, I knew we had to start with identifying the individual user stories/flows for the app's primary users: The Home Manager, the Home Owner and the Technician.

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I began with a basic user flow and app walkthrough, identifying the core aspects that this MVP would need. Additionally, I put together a high-level database schema to help me better understand what type of information was going to be flowing through the product, and who would need the most autonomy over the information. Ultimately, I determined that the core user to target for the MVP would be the home-manager. Why not the homeowner? The homeowner derives value from this product by having the confidence that everything in there home is up to date and taken care of. The home manager derives value from this product because no product currently offers this level of control for the property manager; we'd be replacing a pen & paper system. Since we were building an MVP, the property manager was the clear choice to prioritize first. We would eventually curate a separate experience for technicians, but for the meantime, they could use modified version of the property manager experience. The discovery process really helped me to understand the full vision of the product, and I could confidently move forward with brand discovery and prototyping with these personas ironed out.

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HouseRX already had a predetermined style guide that they wanted to adhere to, so this was a great start. The development agency currently building the product had also stuck pretty close to this (or rather hadn't strayed too far) so we were in pretty good shape there. After continued conversation with the HouseRX founding team, the term 'home at a glance' kept coming up. How could we create a singular dashboard that provides all the necessary insights to a property manager, homeowner and technician alike? I used the term 'Carfax for homes' as a good inspiration and looked to dashboards like Carfax and other similar software (experian credit score, Hippo Home, etc).

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These examples were a great launching off point for designing the HRX Dashboard - the central landing point for every user.

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Prototyping and Design within Figma.

Designing the HRX Dashboard helped me understand everything else that was missing from this experience. Where can users see the status of the items in their home? Where can property managers track maintenance logged by technicians? Where can technicians go to make their inspection and maintenance process faster and more effective? I sought to answer all of these questions, but I first had to start by creating a simple and beautiful dashboard. The images below can help illustrate the iteration process of putting together a dashboard with all relevant information.

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First pass at the HRX Dashboard made me realize that irrelevant home information was dominating the experience, so I suggested a much leaner hero group to indicate a home health score and other basic info about the home, along with 'upcoming or relevant I&M (inspection and maintenance).

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The second iteration of the HRX Dashboard is nearly reflective of the final product. From my initial conversations with the HouseRX founding team, the core value of the MVP would allow users to navigate their home from a singular dashboard. This meant everything in their home should be indexable by room and by type of equipment (HVAC, kitchen, plumbing, etc). By shrinking the hero section, we were able to better prioritize the actual contents of the home. The problem with this dashboard was that we were still focusing on the condition/status of certain objects in the home, rather than creating the reliable and predictable maintenance timeline for each type of object in the home.

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The final HRX Dashboard prototype made two critical shifts in design thinking: rather than requiring a homeowner to log if an item in their home was damaged, our app would predictably schedule routine maintenance for specific types of items, based on our data on each type of appliance or equipment. This approached helped us deliver on our promise to take pressure off of the homeowner. The second large shift was in our internal navigation. The average property manager managers multiple homes, so the app experience should cater to that. The dropdown in the top right corner allows managers to seamlessly shift between properties, and the horizontal top nav helps contain the HRX experience. The property manager can navigate across the app with the lefthand menu, and the homeowner will only see the horizontal top nav, since they will only have one home.

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I am really happy with the final design for the HRX Dashboard. Since this project is ongoing, we are currently still finalizing the design for the home health score itself.

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Integrating an Interactive Floorplan and Home History.

Now that I had solved for the central dashboard, I needed to address two other key components of the experience - the interactive floorplan and the home history. The HouseRX founding team partnered with a third-party floorplan software to provide a clear and seamless way for technicians to help navigate a home. Through user interviews, we also learned that homeowners love this feature as well. Being able to see your floorplan all at once is extremely helpful, and providing them with that data is instrumental for if they later decide to put their home on the market.

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Embedding the interactive floorplan was one thing - integrating the feature within the existing product ecosystem was another challenge. I determined that the best way to maintain the experience was the keep the user in our app, and carry over existing assets from the HRX dashboard into the floorplan. That way, any user can interact with the floor plan but still interact with familiar elements. Since this project is ongoing, I will have more information about the iGuide implementation at a later date

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How to view your home's history, see details of past visits and even view upcoming tasks and maintenance is still a large question we are continuing to work on. This aspect of the product flow has a lot to do with the technician side of the platform, something we are currently designing and ideating on. For now, the approach to viewing a home's history should be simple. Who came, and what did they work on? In the spirit of creating a system of trusted and local home maintenance, the 'who' of the maintenance is really important, and their experience on the product is vitally important. Come back to see some of those findings at a later date.

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Learnings and Insight

This has been one of the most meaningful case studies in my career so far. I have really enjoyed taking a half-baked product and changing it for the better. It has also been one of the most challenging projects I have worked on.  As I continue to work with the founders and the development team, I will update this case study. I wanted to document my progress thus far to help me visualize and articulate my thought process. Am I asking the right questions? That remains to be seen.