Hemsiten

Hemsiten was a startup that helped to simplify home management. Show more

Year

2017

What I did
  • Qualitative user research
  • UX/UI design for app and web
  • Prototyping & user testing
  • Early stage validation
  • Brand idendity & design system

Hemsiten helps you whether you're moving, renovating or just want to keep better track of your accommodation. The service digitizes your document binders and analyzes your expenses to bring your home management into the cloud. The core of the service is the document manager: the user can track expenses in detail, keep track of renovation projects and create tax deductions with one click. Through a marketplace, external partners can integrate their services into the application and offer users the services exactly when they need it.

After onboarding the user is welcomed to her new digital home.

Challenges

When I joined as the first design hire, the founders had a roadmap filled with challenges across product strategy, UX and branding:

  • Shaping the vision to product-market fit through early research and user testing.
  • Proposing and validating new roadmap features.
  • Facilitating between stakeholders to find potential integrations with 3rd party services.
  • Building and deploying a branding with a scalable interface system for the web app.

Solutions

My involvement started with in-depth research of the target market, user and competitor analysis. Because the team was already following an agile approach, it was easy to inject lean UX methodologies and design sprints with stakeholders to identify common goals and opportunities. The sessions resulted in interview and behavior insights, which ultimately helped us to identify core product features like the document manager with the mobile companion app, the expenses tracker, or the maintenance planner.

Design sprints and agile project managment helped to develop core product features.

The user manages files online that uploaded personally or provided through 3rd parties.

Early prototypes of the mobile companion app were used to validate user needs.

The system scans uploaded documents to identify and categorize expenses.

The system makes it easy to plan and to organise any renovation ideas the user has in mind.

Through workshops with 3rd party services we developed a marketplace to offer services like cleaning or electricity for home owners. The user can browse all services by categories.

Visual details are used across the platform. This caroussel appears after registration and lists a number of key features with custom illustrations.

The signups through the landing page were one early metric to evaluate the features.

Results

From the very beginning, the team benefited from my extensive background in UX/UI, stakeholder integration and frontend development. During my involvement the core of the platform was developed, early-adopter users were turned into customers, and the team was able to secure further investments. My focus on integrated design and lean UX methodologies helped the founders to shape their vision into a scalable product. The interface system enabled the product owner and engineering team to ship features independently.

Many features were researched and tested with potential stakeholders in mind - for example an assistant for real estate agents to hand over the digital account to new home owners.