Challenge
Homeowner current state: Homeowners take an ad hoc and scattered approach to maintaining and managing their home, if at all. While doing DIY research, the guidance homeowners receive is generic and not personalized to their home maintenance and management experience. And some homeowners do not always realize the benefits of maintenance and improvements until the home sells.
Enterprise current state: Fannie Mae lacks insight into changes in property valuation and collateral risks between financing events. Existing appraisal condition ratings are not precise and are taken as a snapshot in time. We lack a means for influencing behavior to ensure the collateral is maintained.
Solution
Homeowner future state: A mobile application called Pillar that will provide homeowners a single, personalized channel for home education and maintenance guidance. Pillar shows homeowners the value of proactive maintenance from a cost savings perspective and incentives homeowners to take action to maintain their home and increase their home value.
Enterprise future state: The Pillar application will give Fannie Mae a stronger risk management through updated collateral valuation through data obtained from homeowners.
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Brief
The Customer Experience Design (CXD) Team was asked to provide design strategy and UX/UI capabilities for the Fannie Mae Enterprise Innovation Team (EIT) to assist in the incubation and refinement of a concept called Pillar, a digital hub that helps homeowners maintain and manage their home by helping them plan and track home maintenance.
WHAT IS THE Enterprise innovation team?
EIT’s mission is to rapidly invent, build, and incubate new capabilities, services and business models from ideas sourced enterprise-wide that leverage Fannie Mae’s core assets and domain expertise to reimagine and push beyondFannie Mae’s core business, and uphold Fannie Mae’s crucial role in the housing system.
EIT was created to expand Fannie Mae’s agile market-oriented innovation engine, leverage customer insights into actionable service and activity ideas, and test specific aspects of our strategy by:
Rapidly inventing, building, and incubating new activities, services, and business models - An innovation strategy & process sets the guardrails and direction in the early stages as teams iterate and ideas progress
Managing innovation activities as an Enterprise Portfolio - A portfolio with concepts across the value chain allows for a broad spectrum of potential solutions.
Providing structure to ideation through stage-gated governance and processes - Governance with clear stages and filtering gates allows space for iteration and creativity with clear requirements to progress
What is the innovation process & where is pillar in this process?
The innovation process is divided into 4 separate stage-gates; Ideation, Concept Validation, Incubation and Scale. All innovation concepts are initially developed through an innovation design sprint in the Ideation phase then funneled through each stage-gate with approval from EIT Leadership.
Pillar is currently in the Concept Validation phase which main focus is flushing out the concept, it’s core offering, and testing it with end users.
Objectives of the concept validation phase
The objective of the Concept Validation phase is to build out a more robust Pillar concept by strengthening the Pillar business case. With a strong business case, we want to test the desirability, viability, and feasibility of the concept and compose an Incubation Proposal to get the Pillar concept to the next stage-gate, Incubation.
MY ROle
My role in this effort was to continuously refine the Pillar concept throughout the Concept Validation phase by:
Conducting generative research with 14 participants to validate/refine homeowner pain points & needs
Defining personas
Creating a user journey and user flow with refined features based off of generative research
Developing and facilitating a value proposition workshop to determines Pillar’s customer value propositions
Conducting 6 usability studies to test refined feature set and user flow
Determining research strategy for Incubation phase
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generative Research: homeowner interviews
The goal of the interviews were to:
Understand how homeowners currently maintain their home
How do participants currently conduct home maintenance and management?
Understand their challenges when doing so
What is their biggest home maintenance friction? What do participants dislike in digital home maintenance tools or within their home maintenance experience?
Understand the key features participants need in a tool like Pillar
What are features participants would expect to see in a tool like Pillar? How would they prioritize these features?
generative research synthesis
During each interview I took copious amounts of notes writing down key data points and quotes. When all the interviews were completed I started to sift through the data points and start to affinities by key themes.
I started to see key themes emerge from the whole home maintenance life-cycle; from planning, to completing, and managing home maintenance tasks and projects.
After the initial synthesis I walked EIT through key themes so they had an understanding of the research outcomes.
generative research outcomes
The generative research validated some of our hypothesis but also brought new findings to light. This research determined two personas, refinement of the MVP features, and the development of a Pillar user journey, user flow ,and wireframes.
Uncovered:
Financial planning for projects is one of the biggest pain points for homeowners
Understanding the return on investment of an improvement project is the most desired feature
Homeowners need to trust the application's potential home revenue values
Homeowners expect automated recommendations and reminders of maintenance tasks
Validated:
That homeowners don’t know or realize the benefits of maintenance and improvements
The need for an application that helps users plan, complete, and track home maintenance
There is not a "one-stop-shop" for users to utilize to meet all their home maintenance & management needs
Personas
Through hour research we were able to create two different personas based off of the interviewees. We found that there were two types of homeowners that we interviewed; first-time homeowners and seasoned homeowners. The distinctions between each persona include; years of homeownership, experience level with home maintenance, and intentions for home maintenance.
Feature refinement
As we synthesized the generative research, we started to identify areas of opportunity for the Pillar concept. We took the opportunities and refined the features to better convey the needs we were hearing from interviewees.
Value proposition workshop
With a clear idea of who the Pillar personas are, we wanted to make sure our refined features offer value for each one of them. I created and facilitated a value proposition workshop for EIT and the CXD Team to co-create together value propositions for both personas. This workshop was to gain alignment on the outcomes of the research and understand how this research will impact the product vision for Pillar.
Refined value propositions
The outcomes of the value proposition were two, refined Pillar value propositions specific to each persona type. We wanted to make sure we were capturing how the Pillar features will bring value to our different personas.
User journey
From the generative research we were able to capture a clear picture of what homeowner’s current experience maintaining and managing a home looks like. With our refined features, we were able to start to build the ideal homeowners journey for homeowner’s using Pillar to help them maintain and manage their homes through our “Home Project Education & Assistance” feature, in which a homeowner can select a home maintenance project to complete, and Pillar will provide a step-by-step guide to help them complete it.
This journey map was a great way for the CXD Team and EIT to co-create what the ideal end to end experience would look like.
user flow
With alignment on the high level end to end user journey, we wanted to get more granular on what the experience might look like in the form of mid-fi wireframes depicting key CTA’s, features, and notifications within the Pillar journey.
Wireframes
The purpose of the Concept Validation phase is to test the desirability of Pillar. Now that we had our refined features and an idea of what the high level end-to-end journey might look like, we wanted to put some wireframes in front of some homeowners and access their reactions to what Pillar is offering. I worked closely with my CXD partner, Joshua (UX/UI Designer) to create some key wireframes that depict the Pillar’s core, refined features. We began with low-fi wireframes and refined until we had key hi-fi wireframes to use for usability studies.
usability studies
With the prototype we created with refined features, we decided to conduct 6 usability studies with homeowners. The goal of the usability studies was to:
Understand the desirability for Pillar
What features do they prioritize over others? Do they understand what Pillar is trying to solve? Is it valuable to them? Would they use Pillar?
Uncover any gaps across the prototype
Is the experience intuitive for participants? What are some gaps within the prototype? Is there anything users would expect to see?
Usability Study Outcomes
The usability studies gave EIT and CXD the validation we needed in terms of the concept itself and what features to prioritize for MVP. 6/6 participants stated they would download and use Pillar immediately. We also discovered the most prioritized feature for participants is the ROI Calculator.
Feature Refinement
Now that we had completed both generative research and usability studies, we had findings that would help us further refine the Pillar features. We were able to use the findings from the research to flush out our MVP feature set and think about possible features for post MVP. The MVP and post MVP feature sets were crucial to creating a sound Incubation Proposal.
Concept validation outcomes
The CXD Team proved EIT human-centered research capabilities that aided in the refinement of the Pillar concept and impacted the development of a sound Incubation Proposal for EIT’s Leadership Team to approve Pillar to get to the next innovation stage-gate.
With this research the CXD was able to validate/refine homeowner pain points, define personas, refine Pillar’s feature set, and build a user flow and prototype. The research outcomes help build the business case for Pillar within the Incubation Proposal. The EIT Leadership Team reviewed the Incubation Proposal and approved and funded Pillar to enter the Incubation stage-gate for 2021.
CXD business outcome: By developing an interview and usability study approach and defining target customer characteristics, CXD informed the Pillar concept’s research strategy that will help assess the desirability and viability of the concept which will help Fannie Mae mitigate loss and reduce collateral risk by providing insights on the types of home improvement projects that have a positive impact on ROI and preserve the value of Single-Family properties.
Next Steps
CXD created a high level research strategy preparation for Pillar to move from the Concept Validation phase to the Incubation phase. CXD was successful in conducting qualitative, generative research and usability studies with 20 homeowners within the Concept Validation phase. The Concept Validation research validated pain points, hypotheses around features, and gave us insight into Pillar’s desirability.
Our goal in the Incubation phase is to test the Pillar concept at a larger scale to mitigate as much risk as possible before moving Pillar into development. We decided a quantitative survey with a larger participant pool would ideal in further refining the customer segments, prioritizing Pillar feature sets, and testing desirability.
But with a quantitative survey we understand we would be receiving more “say” data. And identified that there might be some risk in over-investing in certain features because what homeowners say they want and how they behavior can differ. We decided that once the quantitative survey will be complete, we would like to do some in-market testing. This will give us the “do” data we are looking for to feel confident moving Pillar into development within the Incubation phase.
Partner Feedback: “Rachel, thank you for helping us to know our users! Your synthesis of what we know and don't know -- then finding ways to test -- has been critical for Pillar. Thank you. Wishing you the best in your next endeavors.” - Katherine Appel, EIT Project Manager
Thank you!
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My Contributions
Developed research plan and conducted interviews , synthesized & presented findings to EIT, refined feature set, developed usability protocol and conducted usability tests, created and facilitated value proposition workshop, developed user flow, and created research brief for incubation phase.
Team
Rachel Tarulli (Lead Design Strategist) & Joshua Trangle (Lead UX/UI Designer)
Timeframe
4 Months