BidPro
Digitizing Word of Mouth
Overview
How do we incentivize a tech resistant industry to go online? “90% of the marketplace is still word of mouth” says Andrew Colom of BidPro describing the untapped market of the home services industry BidPro wanted to reach. It would mean exponential success for the e-commerce app that connected millennial homeowners with home service professionals. BidPro founders Andrew Colom and Mike Jennings came to us with that challenge November of 2019. We delivered.
Role
1 of 3 UX Designers
Timeframe
4 weeks, 3 sprints
Deliverables
Domain Research, Competitive Analysis, Persona, Journey Map, Site Map, MVP - Mid Fidelity Prototype, Annotated Wireframes
Tools Sketch, Figma, Balsalmiq
Notes
This was a contract position with BidPro LLC.
Background
BidPro is an E-commerce app that connects millennial homeowners to home service providers or “pros” as a one-stop shop to find, preview, bid, schedule and pay for home service requests. With the homeowners side of the app covered they came to us to design a Minimum Viable Product focusing on the “pro” side of the two way marketplace.
The Brief
BidPro wanted to convert word of mouth referrals onto a digital platform through focusing on these three areas: the “pro” networking feature, communication and chat between homeowners and professionals and the bid process for service jobs.
Scoping & Alignment
Our first objective was to gain alignment with the client on priorities and goals which we did through a prioritization activity at the kick off meeting. Together, we established that the primary focus would be the “pro” networking referral w/chat integration and our secondary focus would be the bidding process.
Prioritization activity: Clients place features on an X/Y Matrix: the top right position being the most desired requiring minimum effort (X axis), and providing maximum value (Y Axis).
Research & Findings
Our focus then shifted to research where we wanted to understand the current state of digital platforms available to home service providers and find potential opportunities for BidPro on the “pro” side.
Through domain research we found that home improvement was the fastest growing retail category in the United States. On the surface this meant plenty of opportunity for BidPro to attain home service professionals onto a digital platform.
We also found that “word of mouth” marketing clearly played an important role in the world of construction which still relied heavily on analog tools. The problem then lies in inserting a digital ethos into the home service industry and its old school ways.
We established our assumptions, our objectives and questions that we wanted to ask our target users. We interviewed one subject matter expert (SME) and 10 potential users to find out the following:
How do home service professionals build and use their network?
What tools do they use to track their network?
What roles do referrals play in their professional lives?
Analysis & Synthesis
Through interviews and affinity diagramming we learned that:
Home service professionals connect with other home service professionals through family/friends, community, union and job sites.
Business cards are the means by which they exchange information and refer each other whether they are “tech forward” or not.
It is important for them to maintain a good reputation in their tight knit communities as they rely on referrals to get jobs.
People in their network are often busy and unavailable for work and they don’t like to turn down jobs.
Interview Quotes
“Pretty much everybody I met has business cards and I just have a mini Rolodex”
— Jason, User
“The biggest problem we have is that the contractors will double book”
-Andrew, User
‘These contractors all know each other, they've known each other for a long time. It's just word of mouth.”
— Matt, SME
With our takeaways, we had enough data to create our target customer:
The Persona
Identifying Opportunity
We follow Robert on his journey which includes John, a homeowner. John is looking for a contractor. Robert is booked for the month so he finds someone else to refer to John. The opportunity starts at the point where Robert wants to make a referral. Having Robert and our opportunity identified, we were able to define what we needed to solve for in our Problem Statement.
Problem Statement
Well-connected home service professionals need a way to help each other out while monetizing their networks making word of mouth networking more lucrative and efficient.
Brainstorm
To get our creative thoughts flowing we practiced a few rounds of a brainstorming exercise called 3-12-3
We generated dozens of ideas and referred back to our design principles to converge overlapping designs. We narrowed them down to four concepts:
Ability to build a team - collaboration
Digital business cards - leveraging technology
Regulating supply and demand - managing availability
A “pro-centric” feed - customized job listings
Uh oh, problem
Upon reviewing our concepts we realized that the “digital business card” provided no benefit for Robert aside from “going digital” which he had little desire to do. The transaction ended at the exchange of information: he scans in a business card and now has it stored and ready to share on his phone. But so what? Why would he take the extra step to open the app, sign up and scan his card when it would be so much easier to just pull a business card out of his back pocket or take a picture?
How might we fully leverage technology to make it worth it for him to take the extra steps? There had to be a gain or reward. What if we provided financial incentives to those that were making referrals? What if the digital business card provided a direct referral with one tap? This would bring actual value in signing up for Bid Pro all the while doing something home service professionals already do - refer each other. We now follow Robert on his journey with the BidPro App.
With BidPro, Robert is able to make a referral to John with a few taps as well as save John the time of going back and forth with the the referral Mike. BidPro gives John the convenience of being able to see Mike’s availability and book through Mike’s BidPro profile. Once Mike completes the job, Robert gets his referral bonus.
With the digital business card being fully fleshed out we felt solid enough in all our concepts to begin sketching. We realized there were alternate possible paths for each concept and expanded them to a total of six to test.
Testing & Results
We conducted usability tests for six concepts with home service professionals to narrow down our top features.
Concept D “Balance of Supply & Demand” was rated the highest as home service professionals felt excited by the monetary reward and no longer having to turn down jobs.
Concept B the “Super Business Card” and Concept F the “Pro-centric Job feed” tied for 2nd place.
The Concepts
B The “Super Business Card”
A digital business card (either a scanned and converted physical card or a native digital card) that pros can share with each other and with clients. Anyone passing along a card that results in a booked and completed job would receive a referral bonus
D “Balance of Supply & Demand”
Help home service professionals who are too busy to take on a job connect with Pros who have availability and want the job. The referring pro would receive a bonus
F The “Pro-centric Feed”
A job feed that allows pros to search for jobs according to their preferences of distance, time and price range. They also have the capability to bid if the price is “open”.
Through further testing and iteration we merged Concept F “Pro-centric Feed” into Concept D “Balance of Supply & Demand”.
Final Design
Prototype Walkthrough Video
We begin with The “Super Business Card” followed directly by Balance of Supply & Demand. Balance of Supply & Demand starts with the page “Direct Leads”.
For Future Consideration
We had the following recommendations for where we left off
Continue to test different models for incentivizing referrals.
Continue to refine and improve the chat feature in order to keep users engaged with the platform.
Consider other target markets. User interviews showed that realtors provide a bridge between homeowners and contractors.
Results
We presented our design at our final client meeting and they were extremely impressed.
“Digitizing and inviting, that’s really going to spur organic growth, this sums up a lot of what we need for an MVP”
“We’re a little overwhelmed, by it but in a good way. It was a complex concept, the baffling part is what you’ve done is pretty key, pretty easy…the simplicity speaks volumes.”
-Mike Jennings & Andrew Colom, BidPro founders
BidPro thought the “Super Business Card” was the true innovation by mimicking the traditional practice of exchanging information while reaching and gaining new customers and incentivizing them to stay on the platform. If business cards are the preferred method by which home service professionals use to exchange, store and refer their network by word of mouth, how powerful would it be to have that network on BidPro?
Reflections
Having a conversation of “why” even in the later stages of concepting made our ideas into a truly win win situation for both the user and the business. I learned to push for the “whys” and the “hows” even if the initial solution seemed clear and what it meant to really leverage technology designing from a business oriented mindset.
