OCT 2017 - NOV 2019 | Founder
With limited customization options for style savvy furniture shoppers to express their individual sense of design, finding quality products is hard, time consuming and often costly. Consumers have to browse 100’s of products from a variety of sources, sometimes resorting to flea markets and garage sales in a never ending treasure hunt for that perfect piece.
To be an inspirational Made-to-Order Furniture store that allows style savvy shoppers to create custom designs they can visualize, celebrate, and purchase from the comfort of their homes.
The $500 billion furniture industry is a market that could provide an opportunity to disrupt the established mental models customers use to find and buy furnishings for their homes giving them creative freedom to express their individual style. A perfect place to follow our hunches and explore the feasibility and profitability of a made-to-order furniture company.
The goal of our discovery activities was to quickly validate our ideas for a made-to-order furniture business and pivot if needed. The team would leverage UCD, Lean and Design Thinking processes to connect with our target audience, challenge our assumptions and test our ideas quickly.
We knew that the project would require lots of user insight and because it was mostly exploratory at this stage we would need a generative research strategy to find product market fit.
We also understood that customers buy emotionally but use their intellectual minds to find ways to justify the expense. In order to enter the conversations already going on in their heads we would need to think like them, understand their desires, goals, pains and fears. Our research would rely on interviews, field studies and market research to help us craft a disruptive solution.
Our research would rely on interviews, field studies and market research so we could create a fun and memorable experience to attract and retain our customers to ensure the success we desired and scale the brand.
Then we would need to quickly build some prototypes to test our theories and uncover the things we didn't know to ask as we would iterate our way to an MVP candidate.
Business Modeling. I used a Lean Startup canvas and a traction roadmap to begin to frame the problem, identify customer segments, and jot down some solutions to see if the project would be feasible. The model was a way to capture my assumptions and quickly begin to get some feedback on the idea. It would also help define some business requirements as we began to populate our Jira instance.
Problem Statement. To set the tone for the upcoming outreach efforts I put together a problem statement to capture the who, what, when, where and why of the challenges faced in finding a piece of furniture you really like that isn't junk.
Opportunity Statement. "The frustrating, time consuming and often costly process of buying furniture is an opportunity to disrupt a $500b a year industry. Giving users the option to design made-to-order products that connect with them on an emotional level from the comfort of their own home exceeds the limited customizations available today."
Outreach Plan. You can't start an exploration without a plan. Our plan would focus on outreach with 25 - 60 year old women searching for quality furniture. After we collected data from about 8 women we would move on to remodeling and interior design groups to engage with design savvy seekers. The plan outlined our activities, defined the questions we were trying to answer and generated the scripts for our conversations.
User Interviews. We talked to 30 different people leveraging friends and family, Craigslist and man on the street interviews capturing will participants coming out of furniture stores in our area.
Competitive Analysis. It was important to understand the market to identify how we could capture marketshare, identify opportunities and define our unique value proposition. Performing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) would help us figure out what is working, where the gaps were and what our competitive advantage might be.
The biggest benefits to this research was identifying a huge differentiator giving customers the ability to modify foundational features which was something only custom furniture designer/builders could offer at a substantial cost. We also discovered that most options were limited to fabrics and finishes validating there was a real opportunity.
Empathy Maps. During our one-on-one and man on the street interviews we would use the empathy maps to capture what the participants said, did, thought and felt. The data we collected from the interviews gave us insight into our users desires, fears, motivations and emotions associated with steps in their journeys.
Journey Workshops. To help us with journey mapping we had 5 participants collaborate with us, asking them to think out loud as they would we create workflows in Lucid Chart. There were some interesting moments during these workshops were we discovered some of their emotional responses to the frustration with the current way they were shopping and a desire to personalize.
Customer Journeys. To improve the experience for frustrated shoppers I would need to really understand their journeys and why they made the decisions they did. During the discovery phase we would develop a number of user snapshots to expose some common patterns that would inform our persona development, journey maps of the current experiences, journey maps of a proposed path and key onboarding opportunities to capture our customers attention.
We discovered 3 primary paths shoppers would take to find products that fit their style and quality requirements, including Treasure Hunters looking for that one of a kind antique, brick-and-morter shoppers, and an online audience that geeked out on home remodeling and interior decorating sites to get inspiration for their next big remodel project.
Personas. Defining our ideal customers personas became the center point for ideation, prototyping and testing our concepts. We would focus on those profiles one at a time to imagine solutions to their biggest pain points. Using data we collected during our early discovery we wanted to craft some sketches of our customers at different buying stages in order to have an additional layer of situational awareness as we would consider solutions that would server that avatar and align with the business objectives.
Ideation. What made this project unique was it wasn't just fixing a problem to an existing web app. We not only needed to consider the software we needed to build but how it would integrate into the backend processes we would use to build the products. There were a number of business requirements, technology constraints, manufacturing processes and workflows we would need to define while coming up with a viable MVP that allowed customers to customize their furniture in a fun and rewarding way.
In order to come up with some ideas for our tech savvy, device independent target audience, the team would meet to get a common understanding of the problems we were trying to solve, the frustration of the people trying to solve them and a number of potential solutions that was narrowed down to a few good ideas we could get feedback on. We would finally agree to prototype one of our best ideas as quick as we could to test our core activity of designing furniture.
I wanted to look at the ideations from a couple of different perspectives using a Jobs-to-be-done framework and asking "how might we" questions to frame the problem in a solutions oriented narrative.
We would also ask why a lot to get to the root cause of a problem. Knowing why our users did things like searching hours online or spend time looking at flea markets, garage sales and antique malls would lead to a solution that would satisfy their own creative process, give them instant gratification being able to visualize their decisions in real time and the sense of pride they would experience when their friends would ask "where did you get that table? I've never seen anything like it before".
Building in a reward system, some gamification tricks, contests, quizzes, leader boards, and some psychological triggers, we wanted to build a brand that customers loved to use with a potential to disrupt the many ways customers buy furniture today.
The next step was to storyboard our ideas using sketches to work through some of our early ideas.
Wireframes and Flows. Using the storyboards I would then put together some workflows, sitemaps and wireframes to start to add in some details.
Prototypes. A mobile first prototype would start out as a clickable low-fidelity project in Figma that would evolve into a high fidelity Axure prototype with 3D integration so we could test our core experience and make improvements to the 3D interactions making it intuitive and less intimidating for a non-technical audience.
We would also need to prototype the internal workflows to define how designers and developers would work together to continue building assets as the platform scaled. This would lead us to discover a workflow for creating assets in CAD, translate them into Maya with dynamic features to scale in expected ways, using Unity to develop the product. Working in Unity would also give us the ability to add augmented reality controllers to the project.
In the end the prototype we would test was built in Axure using iFrames to pull 3D models from Sketchfab.
Testing. Starting out with Guerilla testing we hung out in at Starbucks asking patrons to participate in paper prototypes to get early feedback. As the prototypes evolved we would test and iterate our way a MVP candidate. We recruited using Craigslist and using some of the users we interviewed during discovery. Test the clickable prototypes was performed mostly remotely using Zoom, recording the users screen as they thought out loud as they designed a table. We would also test with 5 participants in a more contextual surrounding as we observed them click their way through as they thought out loud.
Development. Leading the vision for the project I knew it was more than just some software, it was an end-to-end solution that took customers from an idea to a made-to-order product in a predictable pipeline using lean and agile processes to not only build the software but the physical products as well. A lot of the development effort was finding a efficient platform(s) to produce the experience we wanted, so we tried a lot of different ways including Unity, three.js, and the Sketchfab API to speed up time to market and augment what could be huge development costs. Why re-invent the wheel?
We were able to quickly gather user data, stand up a project in JIRA, define the business and technical requirements, define a brand story, create a design system, iterate through some interaction models and build a clickable prototype to validate our concept. I can't say the project was easy and didn't have any challenges to address. There were many and each was an invitation to pause, re-evaluate and collectively find alternative solutions. What we did create was a blueprint for a turnkey, made-to-order furniture business designed to disrupt the way people buy furniture.
Lessons learned. 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb but in the end we found a promising workable solution for MVP. As a founder I learned a lot about Entrepreneurship, a Success Mindset, Brand, Marketing, Advertising, Lean Innovation Frameworks, Design Thinking, Game Mechanics, and building a manufacturing automation prototype.
There were so many new skills I picked up during this project. It helped me get a much broader perspective on the tools, processes and methods we use in UX and how closely they align to the strategic processes other professional roles use to understand, explore and create, and the psychological that motivate us to make experiences memorable on and emotional level. I also got to geek out on Continuous Innovation Practices, Lean Frameworks, Design Thinking, Design Sprints and Leading Workshops, 3D, Immersive AR/VR Experiences and Entrepreneurship.
