Project

Tap into a $430 billion market by developing a program to connect home service pros with Wayfair customers in need of assembly and installation services. To accomplish this, give customers the ability to add assembly to their order on site, and create an app to allow local service pros to pick up Wayfair assembly jobs

Highlights

• Partnering with user research to interview service pros and develop a baseline persona for a new user base
• Creating voice and tone guides for two unique audiences—customers and service pros
• Working with brand creative to identify and refine program value props
• Introducing conversation workshops to cross-functional partners to establish a user flow for pro acquisition and job matching
• Creating a messaging matrix to audit touchpoints across channels, determine the intent of each message, and identify opportunity areas
• Collaborating with design to take content wireframes to full-fledged mocks ready for development
• Writing consistent, clear UX copy for brand new app

A DEEPER DIVE

Background

As an online retailer for all things home, Wayfair flat-packs many of it’s packages, leaving customers to manage confusing instructions and bags full of tiny parts on their own. To tackle this problem, the company began partnering with a third party vendor. Customers could add assembly services directly on Wayfair, and the vendor would find a service pro (think: your local handy person) to go to the customer’s home and assemble their furniture purchase at a scheduled time.

In late 2017, Wayfair decided to bring pro sourcing in-house to reduce costs, ensure stability, and monitor quality more effectively. I joined the Home Services team as the primary content strategist and we started in on what would be a year-long process involving research, design, development, and QA.

Role: Content Strategist

Skills & Deliverables

• User Research
• Voice and Tone Guides
• Conversation Workshop Facilitation
• Content Wireframes
• Content Matrix
• UX Copy
• Stakeholder Management

Process

Building the Wayfair Home Services program from scratch was a colossal effort involving dozens of partner teams, stakeholders, and dedicated cross-functional team members. Rather than recapping every step of the process, I’ll stick to the highlights. I’ll also focus primarily on how we developed the service pro app, though we were concurrently working on the customer experience.

Research

Home Services introduced an entirely new user base to our brand—service pros working in gig economy were entirely different from the typical Wayfair customer. To effectively design for them, we needed to learn more about who our typical pro was. I worked closely with our user researcher to conduct user interviews and focus groups.

Voice & Tone

After we’d developed our pro persona, I decided to begin creating voice and tone guides for each of our user types: customers and service pros. These documents established how we would talk to each group, how the tone would change based on where they were in their journey, and what language we’d use to ensure consistency. These guides evolved throughout the project, but establishing a strategy early gave us a baseline to guide us as we moved forward.

Conversational Design

As we began designing our user flows, I hosted a conversation workshop with cross-functional stakeholders. This exercise brings together many perspectives and allows us to ground ourselves in what conversation we need to be having with the user and its natural hierarchy. From this, I developed content wireframes and collaborated with our designer to create initial mocks of the experience. We shared the mocks with our team and stakeholders, incorporated feedback, and iterated on the designs as we turned them into high-fidelity mocks.

Messaging Strategy

During this time, I was also working on a content matrix to track our messaging across channels, including the pro app, emails, push notifications, and SMS. It was important to our stakeholders to communicate a lot of information to the service pros, including job expectations, processes, and policy. As the notifications began to build up, I was concerned about creating an information overload for our users. The matrix helped us identify the right message to send, and the right time to send it.

UX Writing & QA

The team continued to develop long term visions and create frameworks for expansion throughout the duration of the project, but as we approached launch my design partner and I also began refining the app designs. For me, this meant writing a lot of UX copy. I focused on creating clear, concise, and consistent copy throughout the app. For things like navigation, I sought out competitive examples and conducted a tree test with users to ensure an intuitive experience. As engineering began implementing the designs, we worked closely with them on design and content QA.

Results

Our team launched the beta version of the service pro app and began offering in-house assembly to customers within just a year of the project’s conception. Though I transitioned off the team shortly after launch, the groundwork I created for our messaging strategy is still in place and has effectively scaled with the growing business. Within six months of the initial launch, the program had extended from Boston into five other major metros. The average satisfaction rating amongst service pros was 4.79/5 and they had an NPS of 82.