Housejoy.in is a door-step delivery service provider, which caters to large Indian market needs for home services such as Home Cleaning, Repairs, Beauty Salon, Home maintenance etc. We identified our largest blocker to be the visibility & discoverability of our services by the target customers. All categories (read Services) were being managed by different teams, but there was a gap amongst them which facilitated completely different UI flows across all of services. Inherently the brand failed to deliver a consistent User experience.
Existing Category/Services Framework
The existing framework allowed different services to be categorised under different Levels
L1 - Category name
L2 - Service name
L3 - Subservice list
But this framework did not allow flexibility or the scalability to introduce newer categories or services. Which is the main reason all UI flows differed from each other.
Social Proof:
- Based on our user shadowing sessions and user testing performed, the results indicated user's difficulty in discovering new services and finding services they are already acquainted with
- Our user testing suggested user's are more comfortable in finding services if they are presented those upfront, rather than being hidden under different layers or Levels as framework suggested.
[For e.g. Carpet Cleaning comes under L3 in current framework, user has to dig it out from layers of different categorisation & groups. 85% of our user test results suggested that users could not figure it out. On the other hand, for some users 'Carpet Cleaning' must fall under Home Cleaning, while for some it could be part of 'Laundry' services. This implies categorisation is a tricky subject when it comes to user's perception]
[For e.g. Carpet Cleaning comes under L3 in current framework, user has to dig it out from layers of different categorisation & groups. 85% of our user test results suggested that users could not figure it out. On the other hand, for some users 'Carpet Cleaning' must fall under Home Cleaning, while for some it could be part of 'Laundry' services. This implies categorisation is a tricky subject when it comes to user's perception]
Conclusion:
- Users need a consistent behaviour throughout the application, it improves their chances of exploration and discoverability of new services if they are familiar with the UI behaviour.
- When a user is looking for a particular service, he/she is essentially looking for the exact keywords For e.g. Carpet, AC, Bathroom etc. A user does not care which category he may find these objects hidden under or under how many layers. It is in user's interest to bring these objects upfront.
- Categorisations must be used only for grouping services under intuitive titles For e.g. "Cleaning", "Home Repairs" etc. These category titles need not be part of back-end framework, but only for user facing interfaces.
- Generalise framework to following levels
L1 - Service name
L2 - subservices
L3 - Product detail page (PDP)
Proposed Category Map (new framework)
New UI flow:
Consistent UI Page-to-Page flow for all Categories/Services
