Homify Marketplace

Background

What is Homify?

Homify is an international home and living B2B2C SAAS platform, connecting consumers with professionals to build or renovate their homes.

Hundreds of thousands of home and living professionals (eg. Architects, Interior Designers and other home builders) use the homify platform to network, display their work, and promote their businesses. Tens of millions of monthly users visit the platform to search for inspiration, build a community and look for professional help on their home building and renovation projects.

In my first few months at Homify, I concepted and owned the UX of the Leads Generation Tool, a feature that more than quadrupled revenue early in its release. That is documented in the Leads Generation Tool Case Study.

Post Leads Tool Release

Despite early success of the Leads tool, Professionals were still not closing projects at a high enough rate.

Six months into its release, the Leads tool had generated over 40,000 Leads worldwide. Premium membership signups had grown by over 500%, but long-term membership satisfaction and retention rates were quite low.

It was clear we needed to drill deeper to better understand the problem.

Research Initiatives

The Customer Success Management Team

In an effort to gather direct user feedback to develop insights as to what was going wrong, I was tasked to build and co-manage a new Customer Success Management team. Through this new team of 6-7 account managers directly interfacing with Premium members via phone and email on a daily basis, I conducted a series of User feedback initiatives. These consisted of surveys, questionnaires, interviews and small tests of User flow and interface changes.

After about three months of these initiatives, I came to a set of key findings, which I then used as the basis of a new Product design solution. I called this feature the Homify Marketplace.

Research Goals

In the early months of the CSM team, our goals were to test:

• The correlation between Lead Generation form questions and quality of leads (or see if there even was a correlation)
• The conversion rates of number of quality leads generated to Projects closed by Professionals
• A correlative metric of number of qualified leads generated to optimum Premium satisfaction and Membership retention rates

Methodology

Our Research initiatives consisted of:

• Lead Generation form tests – varying numbers of questions, types of questions, and phrasing of questions
• Daily feedback calls and emails both with Leads and Premium members
• A series of surveys and questionnaires for Premium members and normal users
• Phone Interviews with Premium members

Key Findings

• High quality leads shared three common characteristics:
  1. Knowledge – a general understanding of how much a project costs both in money and time
  2. Means – the ability to afford the cost of the project, both in terms of money and time
  3. Intent – the continued desire to pursue the project after knowledge and means have been established
• We discovered there was a poor conversion funnel of Users entering the Lead flow to closed projects for Professionals, primarily because our qualification process was not filtering properly for these key characteristics
• Both normal users and Professionals preferred that the user contact the Professional (instead of the other way around). Users that were willing to message Professionals demonstrated a high level of intent. Small tests which featured this reversed flow yielded a 400% higher conversion rate of closed projects for Professionals.
  • This insight was particularly relevant because the Leads Tool flow relied upon Professionals reaching out to Users after their leads had been posted
• Through surveys we saw that 55% of site visitors were unaware that you could find a professional on the website, and many users expressed a lack of understanding in terms of expected behavior upon entering the Lead flow.

Solution Design

Based on the newly found insights from our research initiatives, I designed a new feature, which I named the Marketplace. In the Marketplace:

• The value proposition (and hence User expectations) would be clearly stated in the landing section
• Users would be funneled to browse existing projects according to characteristics they were looking for and then message the Professionals who had completed them
• Users would filter Projects by relevance based on project type, budget and location needs, themselves
• Users would instantly get an understanding of the Project costs in both time and money, and only the users who were still intent on looking into a project would move forward in messaging Professionals
• Professionals would receive messages only from a filtered group of knowledgeable, high-intent users with the means to engage in a project discussion. This would save Professionals time and frustration.

Wireframes

Prototype & Testing Results

In order to rapidly test the Marketplace product concept, I enlisted a developer to string up some basic pages of my designs that allowed a select few professionals to populate project data. The CSM team then guided Lead candidates through the flow to browse said projects.

In initial tests of the Marketplace prototype, lead-to-project conversion rates exploded from 0.09% to 8.34% – more than a 92x increase.

Project Status… ongoing

Upon its pitch, management’s reception of the Marketplace solution was generally positive, with a greenlight to develop in the coming months. Shortly afterwards however, the company suffered a massive exodus of development team resources and the project was shelved until higher resource availability.