Online Home Design Platform
COOHOM
/ BACKGROUND & MY ROLE
May 2015 - Feb 2017 ( 2 years )
Project for Kujiale.com(Exacloud Inc.)
A family starts with a house. This project aims to provide a design platform for the home decoration and remodeling, and hope to let everyone can design their dream home.
My role was to lead the design, I laid out timelines, created a component library and get MVP to a final vision. I worked closely with PMs, technical lead, and 5 engineers to design, explore and iterate UI concepts, interactive prototypes and do some user research. Also, we joined forces with partner teams to align and standardize the end result.
/ PROBLEM SPACE
People want to get inspiration and ideas for decorating or remodelling the house.
This journey includes the work people do for looking for inspiration, achieve design ideas, and getting the furniture to match the house size. We considered a number of use cases and existing models to help determine the real house size and furniture models. We want to help users build their dream home in an intuitive way.
How to use these professional softwares to design my house?
It's hard to imagine what my new house looks like!
/ OPPORTUNITY & EXPLORE
We want to create a platform to make user design their own home that what they want or imagined basic on the real floor-plan and real furniture models.
Find real floor-plan
Create the apartment and house plans across the country, people can search and use directly
Use, purchase furnitures
Provide real 3D models, sofas, tables and chairs etc, use into the house
and purchase directly
Export house picture
Rapidly output the pictures and the design plan of people's dream house which they designed
Find & Create Floorplan
Decorate House
/ USER TEST & ITERATE FAST
Get feedback from users and stakeholders and iterate fast
We quickly built an interactive prototype and tested it to get feedback. Some of these research and feedback helped us make usability improvement, and some helped us make major changes in the design direction.
/ DESIGN DECISIONS
Prioritizing the features based on user research
Based on user research and competitive analysis, include the following features that provide the most value to users in the platform:
Reduce the cost of learning
Feasible hierarchy relationship and guidance could help users to understand and use tools quickly. In this platform, I made the hierarchy and logic from left to right. User only need to drag models from the left model zone onto the operating zone and renders the image on the right finally.
Be mindful of function priority
Collect and analyze users' usage habits and frequency of use, transfer and hide functions that are uncommonly used, integrate and group commonly used functions.
Simplify the workflow
Provide convenient and common template to users, they could select the light and quality which match his design directly and save time to adjust various complex parameters.
/ VISUAL PART
Reduce the influence of color on operation and design process, use brand color to highlight key functions and guide users to operate. Simplify the layout by following the direction of the visual flow
Fin.
This project is the first product I have been in charge of independently for more than two years. Through this project, it leads me into the world of designing user products. COOHOM has not only exposed me to some basic user research but also enabled me to take the project from the early prototype stage to the rapid iteration stage with tens of millions of users. Of course, the more important things in this process is that it provides me an opportunity to work in a team environment. In this process, I have learned a lot from product managers, developers, customer service and sales people.