Nandy’s
Cleaning Service
Overview
Nandy’s Cleaning Services is a massachusetts-based cleaning agency that provides residential and commercial cleaning services to massachusetts residents.
On this project, I was required to design the web-app for the company meant to be used as both a company website to house information of the company and a web-app to allow users book their choice cleaning service.
Role
Product designer, product strategist
Product Strategy, User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing
Background
The need for professional cleaning services has grown over the years with a major part of the population dealing with tight schedules and scale of priorities as regards their time. More so, the difference between a professionally cleaned space and a normal cleaned space is always glaring.
Massachusetts is a wide area with a lot of individuals and firms who require professional cleaning services. This necessitated Nandy’s Cleaning Service, a massachusetts-based cleaning service to develop a web product that makes it easy for users to schedule their choice cleaning service from the comfort of their device.
Methodology
I devised the double diamond process as the principal methodology for this project.
The major reason for this is that the double diamond model scales well to accomodate varying situations and we evisaged that this project would present varioud user scenarios that needed to be tackled. The model is shown below;
Problem Narative
Nandy’s previous website was just a usual website that provided info about the company. The only way to get customers was for customers to call the number on the website to book for cleaning service. Dealing with customers over the phone to ascertain their needs was time-consuming and become too mundane for the business. The company required something simpler and easier to save time on both the company and the user’s sides and also ensure proper documentation and service delivery. I was to lead a re-design of the web system to support the following;
Showcase all info about the company
Showcase all info about the products and services
Allows users to book their choice cleaning
Allow users to get an estimate costing on the space needed to be cleaned
The Product Vision
We wanted an easy-to-use web platform that showcases all the possible informaton on the company and its services, and also allow potential customers make bookings and get estimates for their services.
User story development &
functionality checklist development
I held two (2) technical sessions with the communication executive of the firm. The objectives of the technical sessions were;
To develop the full business requirements for the product - This is the full checklist of what the business owners want to achieve for their users and the company. It would help in developing the functionality requirements of the product and showcase short, medium and long term upgrades.
To develop the functionality requirements for the product - This is the full checkilist of all the functions the product would fulfil. It is a build-on from the buisness requirements checklist. It feeds into the user story development.
User story development - I developed, executed, tested and documented the user journeys for the product in line with the functionality and business requirements.
User flow development
I proceeded to create high-level sketches showing the user journey and page layouts of the proposed product.
The skeches were pretty much straight forward, the data from the user story development & functionality checklist development were infused into this process. The sketches and flows were audited by the company and approved before design kicked off.
Sketch & User Flow test
The nature of the project meant that we had to test out the sketches and the user flow with the business develoment team. Who doubled as test users.
The test was pretty straight forward. It involved;
Mean time to complete checks
User retention checks
Knowledge management and dissemination checks
Designs
For more details, click here to go to the website
Results and takeaways
Developing a business requirements based product is different from developing a conceptual product. Here I learnt the following;
The user is at the centre of the design; user-centric design.
The product has to be designed with the business goals & process in mind, for instance, if you want to reduce the response time rate for enquiries, you must show that in your design process and make the user journey short but effective.
Do not waste too much time on the the interface, focus on building a business-viable product, certify the flow against test users, then resume fine-tuning the interface. Recall that you can have a very beautiful product interface-wise but it wont meet business requirement/goals.
In designing business requirements-based products, UX writing is a very important skill, and it helps to shorten the time and redundancies in the flow.