DIY Home Depot

The one stop shop for all your DIY projects

A concept app that helps DIY hobbyists find the tools, materials and guidance needed for their projects. While the current Home Depot app provides a straightforward shopping experience, it limits the user base to just homeowners and experienced handymen. The DIY app expands this user base to less experienced folks who love to explore and dabble in minor home projects.

a team of 4

Worked with

an iOS app

to design

Lead researcher

Co-designer

as a

2 weeks

A screenshot of the Home Depot app with arrows pointing to promotional material and product search feature

INITIAL ASSESSMENT

An app aimed at shoppers

The Home Depot app hosted an extensive catalog of home and construction products. It advertised sales and provided features that paired with an in-store shopping experience.

Since the existing app served its existing customers, we chose not to clutter it further with a DIY targeted tool that may not interest all shoppers.

INITIAL ASSESSMENT

Competitive Analysis

The Home Depot app was on par with Lowe's when it came to DIY features, but Lowe's web experience provided a far more extensive DIY guide. The best experience in the app market was Ikea which included a scan-your-space feature and the ability to plan out new furniture additions.

Competetive analysis table comparing Home Depot's DIY options with Lowe's and Ikea.

Survey results

Icons of hands holding phones shaded in to 86%

86% of DIY hobbyists found their inspiration online

of DIY hobbyists only spent a few days or less researching their DIY projects

75% of DIY hobbyists do not track their project and did not need help doing so

User interviews

We screened our participants to make sure they were DIY Hobbyists who had completed at least a few projects in the last year. Our key questions included:

How did you plan for DIY Projects?
What were some challenges you experienced in completing the project?
How often do you visit a hardware store for your DIY home improvement projects?

Quotes

1/1

I statements

Inspiration

I find inspiration from different places

Materials

I need help finding the right materials

Challenges

I experience unforeseen difficulties

Needs guidance

I would benefit from guidance

Tools

I am not sure if I have the right tools

Problem statement

Over the course of their project, DIY hobbyists need help finding the right tools, guidance and materials so that they can feel confident that they will complete their project successfully.

How might we

help DIY hobbyists feel confident?

enable them to acquire the right tools?

help them find the right materials?

help them avoid multiple trips to the store?

provide them with the right guidance?

NARROWING SCOPE

User flows

We went as far as exploring paper pamphlets in our "how might we" ideation phase. To scope it down, we experimented with user flows until we found the shortest path for DIY hobbyists to get to their three key needs: tools, materials, and guidance.

We hypothesized that if DIY hobbyists had these pieces of information ahead of their project, this would help them feel more confident and avoid multiple trips to the store.

Three userflows of a user navigating the Home Depot DIY concept app. It showcases that users only need to tap twice before arriving at the most important parts of the DIY experience: project details, tools and materials.

Lo-fi prototypes

To test our hypothesis, we created lo-fi prototypes that with the goal of enabling these four user tasks for the DIY hobbyist .

I need to browse inspirational projects ideas before I pick one to work on.
I need guidance on how to approach a DIY project.
I need to know which tools I'll need for a DIY project.
I need to know which materials I'll need for a DIY project.

Search results_iphone13midnight_portrait.png

Farmhouse style Project details page_iphone13midnight_portrait.png

A table denoting how many users completed each task in the usability study and average time to completion. Arrows point out that all participants failed to browse DIY ideas, and that they successfully found guidance, tools and materials on the app.

USABILITY TEST

Findings

Kept

For our second iteration of design, we kept what went well with our lo-fi prototype: a project details page that listed materials, tools and guidance in one page.

Updated

The areas that our participants struggled with were the nested scroll bar and finding the search bar when it was situated too closely to other UI elements. To improve on them in the hi-fi designs, we:

Included a scroll affordance in the Tools and Materials containers
Added more padding around the search bar

HI-FI PROTOTYPE

DIY Projects

The app's project browsing experience and details page were updated to include search bar padding and scroll affordances.

Search results_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

Wood kitchen cabinets_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

HI-FI PROTOTYPE

Sort and Filter

The survey results told us that a majority of DIY Hobbyists preferred projects they could complete within a few days.

To help facilitate this, we included a sort and filter experience that takes into account difficulty and duration.

Sort open_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

Filter select_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

Filtered results_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

HI-FI PROTOTYPE

Community & Profile

We wanted to add a further degree of convenience for regular users of the app.

The community page allowed users to directly engage fellow hobbyists on any DIY related questions.

The "My DIY" page focuses on helping the hobbyist keep track of completed and saved projects along with a list of tools they already own.

Community Page_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

My Projects_iphone13starlight_portrait.png

Want to see more of it?

Try the prototype

Say hi