HomeMate
An online platform that connects customers with the best cleaning service professionals in Portugal.
UX/UI CASE STUDY
Team
Solo project
My role
User Research
UI Design
Wireframing
Prototyping
User Testing
Start
October/2023
Duration
1 month
An online platform that connects customers with the best cleaning service professionals in Portugal.
Team
Solo project
My role
User Research
UI Design
Wireframing
Prototyping
User Testing
Start
October/2023
Duration
1 month
HomeMate is a mobile application designed to facilitate hiring cleaning services, making the process more convenient and safe for both professionals and clients.
The application will act as a digital marketplace where freelance professionals can offer their services, and clients can find and hire the professionals who best meet their needs.
This project caught my attention because it offers a convenient service for an increasingly hectic and technology-driven society.
As I am also included in this frantic and technological world, I concluded that acting on this project would be important so that I can benefit from the services it provides and improve my skills as a UX/UI designer.
People often need help finding skilled, available, and reliable professionals close to them, and the lack of references makes this search complicated and risky. Hence, connecting these qualified professionals to customers looking for cleaning services is essential.
I used the design thinking process to understand the problem, generate ideas, develop projects, and iterate until I found a satisfactory solution. The great advantage of this process is that it is flexible and non-linear. In other words, I can discover new challenges, solutions, and insights about users throughout each project stage.
Discovering
Desk Research
Competitor Analysis
Business Model Canvas
Matrix CSD
User Research
Defining the problem
Personas
User Journey
Matrix MoSCoW
Ideating solutions
Task flow
Low fidelity Wireframes & prototypes
Site mapping
Developing solutions
High fidelity Wireframes & prototypes
Visual design
Trying solutions
Usability test
User feedbacks
To better understand the current scenario of the cleaning services market in Portugal and worldwide, I started my research by doing Desk Research. Therefore, I used materials published online, such as news, Google trends, reports, and websites of companies specializing in the type of service in question.
And this was the information I got:
When searching Google Trends, I saw the trend of searching for “urgent maid” in Portugal in the last 12 months. And this is another sign that this is a promising market in the country.
Online Home Services Market Growth Rate
The online on-demand home services market was valued at USD 3,456.00 million in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 6,396.81 million by 2029, registering a CAGR of 8.0% during the forecast period from 2022- 2029.
CAGR - Compound Annual Growth Rate.
There are currently more than 40 thousand companies dedicated to providing cleaning services in the Iberian peninsula, generating around 600 thousand jobs together, with Spain responsible for 88% and Portugal for 12%.
The billion-dollar Portuguese tourism sector
Highlighted among the most visited countries in Europe, Portugal recorded revenue of €22 billion in 2022 in the tourism sector, exceeding pre-pandemic periods (2019) by 20%. The high performance should continue in 2023 and boost not only investments in businesses that operate directly in the segment but also many other related areas, such as real estate and construction – which guarantee the infrastructure to absorb the high flow of tourists – as well as the general services sector, especially those focused on cleaning and maintaining homes, hotels, and other accommodations.
After realizing the success of the online domestic services market nationally and globally, I decided to analyze the applications of 5 direct competitors to identify their failures and learn from them, as well as learn from their successes and develop insights from their platforms.
In this process, I took several screenshots of the application screens to collect interface ideas, analyzed the cleaning service contracting process flows, and compared their functionalities.
And the results obtained were these:
The applications currently on the market offer services beyond domestic cleaning, such as car cleaning, gardening, repairs, and installations.
I also observed that competitors need to improve the user experience from their first contact with the app, and I noticed that most do not use onboarding. In other words, they make users start their experiences by requiring them to perform certain tasks, such as authorizing location and notifications. However, the aforementioned resource is not just a set of beautiful screens; they are the app's gateway and a friendly way of welcoming users.
Continuing the problem immersion phase, I created a Business Model Canvas to visualize the business clearly and concisely, reflect on my ideas, and better filter them.
To better understand the context of the problem and improve my approach to the questions I would ask in user interviews, I decided to create a matrix of certainties, doubts, and assumptions (CSD Matrix) of all the information I obtained with the previous techniques.
To validate all my certainties, assumptions, and doubts, I created some questions for my user research. In this way, I collected both qualitative and quantitative data.
Initially, I carried out an online questionnaire survey, collecting information from 15 participants (of these, 13 were potential users of the client version and 2 cleaning professionals).
Next, I interviewed 4 people via video call and telephone, asking them to share their perceptions, needs, frustrations, and experiences.
Below are the questions aimed at users of the customer version:
And finally, those aimed at users of the professional version:
From all the answers I got, I selected the ones that most helped me create insights and validate the questions I raised in the CSD matrix.
Customers
Professionals
Based on user research, I was able to extract the following insights:
After the empathy phase, it was time to define my target audience. To do this, I created two personas: one that hires cleaning services and another that offers these services.
Based on user research, I decided to focus on the public with a family group of spouses and children between 35 and 50 years old.
That is how Maria and Francisca emerged:
After identifying the target audience, conducting interviews, and defining the objectives and frustrations of the personas created, I still wanted to delve deeper into what users, both clients, and professionals, expect from an online cleaning service contracting platform. Therefore, I created these two user journeys.
In the first phase of project ideation, I created a task flow to map users' steps in scheduling cleaning services for houses and condominiums.
One of the most fun parts of the process has arrived: scratching in search of the ideal solutions for my application.
Making the drawings on paper allowed me to free up my ideas more without getting stuck in perfect shapes and details. Furthermore, after transferring the drawings to Figma, I was able to improve them.
Next, I created a sitemap to visually represent the project and help ensure that its interaction paths are logical, efficient, and pleasant for users.
After creating the screens presented above, I needed to conduct a usability test to determine whether my project's main functionality was fulfilling its role. Furthermore, I needed to get feedback from users to determine what I could improve in the future.
I did the moderated usability test in person and remotely with 2 participants. I gave them the task of hiring cleaning services for both the home and the condominium.
After doing user testing, I realized that I should make the following improvements:
My main challenge was finding more time and resources to recruit more participants for my research, which involved an online questionnaire.
As a result, I could not develop further insights, particularly those related to the experience of cleaning professionals.
Therefore, in the following steps, I intend to do new research focused on developing the version for professional registration.
Furthermore, I will create an onboarding system for the app, as this is an excellent tool for attracting users and making them use the application efficiently.