The easier way to run your home
This startup is where I’ve been working as a UI/UX designer. I’ve worked on many, many features during my two years here, but for this study case, I’m going to focus on the improvements of the app’s overall look and feel, onboarding flow and marketplace feature.
The Biggest Not-So-Little App
The name of the documentary is “the biggest little farm” - so interesting!
I recently watched a documentary about a family that wanted to run a farm in the traditional farming way. They wanted a complex, symbiotic relationship between several animals and crops to live in harmony where they could balance each other out naturally.
This is the sentiment of what we are building at Quartermaster. We want to connect all tasks related to running your home by creating a naturally balanced relationship between homeowners, pros and local businesses.
The Dark Days Are Over
When I first starting working at Quartermaster, the app and website was mostly dark and light grays, it lacked illustrations and felt overall gloomy. One of the biggest changes I helped implement was the shift from grayscale to colors to make it friendlier. To organize this change we worked around a UI kit of standardized colors and illustrations:
Accompanying the color shift was a huge navigation rearrangement. We got rid of the top navigation and make the bottom one more purposeful:
The old dashboards were cold and distant. Background photos with dark overlays made everything look heavy and somber.
There also used to be two layers of navigation (one up top and another one at the bottom) overwhelming homeowners with too many options for where to go.
New dashboards are brighter and feel overall lighter. With the navigation consolidated with five sections at the bottom, our homeowners made their way through our app faster and easier.
Quartermaster is available on both native and web platforms.
The new web dashboard is brighter and clearer. The most important info is now displayed up top, not hidden behind a button. We added an activity feed on the side to keep track of what’s happening in your home.
All Onboard
Onboarding our homeowners has been very heavy in the past. Quartermaster aims to solve the problem of fragmentation, so we need homeowners' input to offer dynamic, long term value. Trying to get our mission across while asking a bunch of questions has be exhausting for the user.
One of the first improvements was allowing homeowners to exit or skip steps and finish later on. No more feeling trapped.
Another upgrade was offer a call to action at the end of each step. For example, if their street community is not active on the platform, we prompt them to take action to help activate it. No more dead ends.
Finally, we separated high effort questions in two stages. For example, for gathering their pro referrals, we started by simply asking if they had hired a pro for a home project, and later asked them for the referral information. No more one-heavy-step.
Covid-Support
A strong value of Quartermaster is to support local businesses. With everything that’s going on with the pandemic, it made sense to shift our support into something concrete that could truly help our local faves.
We designed a marketplace where homeowners can make a donation or purchase gift cards from local spots. We also offer some special deals on gift cards when they redeem points on Quartermaster:
Homeowners receive an email announcing the new feature and available deals on the platform to support local spots.
The email CTA button deeplinks into the deal. If they complete the checkout flow, we present a personalized thank you message from the business they purchased from.
What’s Next
I continue to contribute to the process of planning out new features and improving existing ones. I’m also in charge of running the sprints for the design team - from brainstorming to wireframing to handing off to the devs. I coordinate and organize the design pieces the product requires to move forward.
Since I started at Quartermaster, I’ve seen a big transformation of our product. And although we’ve elevated the product to make it easier to use with features that drive our mission forward, we still have lots of room for improvement as we learn along the way.
Check out some of the animations i've created.
I continue to bring life to the app through illustrations, and now, animations as well. I’ve been learning animations on the side and have noticed how much delight it brings to the user experience.
