end-to-end application
Approximately 50% of American households have taken on at least one DIY home improvement project in recent years. From plaster restoration to leather crafts to landscaping, the DIY market is booming and estimated to be worth over $800B.
MYDIY is an MVP conceptual product for DIY enthusiasts. It's a platform for inspiring creativity, connecting DIYers with quality content and a social network that allows users to follow their favorite creators and share their best projects.
The number of resources for DIYers has increased exponentially in recent years. It’s a market that includes TV shows, magazines, books, websites, YouTube channels and countless lifestyle blogs. The difficulty for DIYers is not finding content, it's sorting through an endless stream of mediocre content to find the quality guidance that they need.
Users may search Pinterest for inspiration, YouTube for instructional videos, Google for miscellaneous tutorials, or various niche message boards for specific advice. There is currently no centralized product that brings the best content from these various platforms together to quickly connect users with the worthwhile resources they're looking for.
To get an overview of the DIY industry, I started with market research to find out who is taking on DIY projects, what their motivation is, and trying to determine where they go to find the inspiration and information that they need to complete their projects.
To better understand the specifics of what online resources DIYers currently have available, I looked at some of the biggest platforms that share turtorials and advice on projects and compared their features.
Talking to the target users of this conceptual app was a critical step towards understanding the most important features users need in an MVP product to get them engaged and to grow an online community.
Summary of interview subjects and findings:
Go-to Resources for DIY Tutorials:
Where Users are Saving DIY Resources:
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interview debrief report
Doing it yourself often doesn't mean doing it by yourself. In my research, I found that many DIYers are working as a team with their partners, family or friends. This persona was created to reflect that reality of working together.
After completing market research and user interviews, there was an abundance of ideas for how to better serve users. Figuring out how to organize the goals for the project and visualize how all the various features might fit together started to take shape by creating a mind map:
To further refine the project goals, I created a value proposition canvas to examine how the most pressing user needs would align with a new product.
With the product priorities established, the next step was to develop a site map. By this stage, the product is taking shape as a DIY aggregator with access to an ever expanding number of resources and user created projects. This site map shows a high level overview of the most prominent pages.
A major uncertainty came up at this time as to how users should enter the product and find content.
There is a lot of overlap between the Home, Search and Explore screens here that would need to be further
explored during usability testing.
In the early stages of designing the product, I wanted to understand the common patterns for aggregator apps such as Pinterest and YouTube, and also those with community created or boosted content like Reddit and Stack Overflow.
During user interviews, cooking kept coming up as a metaphor for DIY. This was an invaluable insight into how users think about projects and encouraged me to look at products like Yummly for their content stream and shopping lists and the New York Times Cooking app for their user comments that can be filtered by how helpful they are.
Conceptualizing the product began with quick hand sketches, generating ideas that would best showcase the external content while also grounding that content within the framework of the app.
With the hand sketches as a guide, I began to develop a low-fidelity wireframe prototype to explore how users would navigate finding content and and how they might save and manage their own projects. This iteration was tested with users to determine issues that would require revision before developing the final UI.
Building a product from the ground up meant establishing a brand identity. It was important that "DIY" be included in the product name, and "MY DIY" was a way of also communicating that this is a very personalized, user-centric product.
The wordmark was designed with solidity in mind - solid plans and solidly built projects.
The logomark is also intended to communicate solidity and to evoke the idea of building blocks as well as a Rubik's Cube - figuring out the puzzle of your project.
Yellow was chosen as a primary product color for 3 reasons:
I tested the low fidelity prototype with 4 users - 2 tests were conducted in person with screen mirroring and 2 were conducted remotely with screen sharing. Users were tasked with finding the best written resource for tiling a backsplash and saving it to their projects
A critcal component of usability testing was to determine what landing page users preferred to find when opening the app. My inclination was to prioritize search on the home screen and include a stream of trending or recommended content below the search bar, similar to apps like YouTube and Reddit, but I wanted to find out what users best responded to.
The A/B test, while obviously very subjective, was illuminating - the content stream seemed like the best choice to me, but users overwhelmingly preferred the more curated, editorial style of the explore page.
Other Key Takeaways from User Testing:
Multi-modal learning:
Beyond aggregating content from a wide array of sources, one of the strongest differentiators of
MYDIY is the ability to filter by content type. Users have the ability to see the top overall
resources for their project, or select the style of learning that works best for them - video content,
written content, or for highly specific content, the community support of the forums.
All content can be voted up or down by the community so that the most useful resources always trend towards the top - saving users the trouble of having to sort through the endless stream of questionable content online.
Integrated User Notes and Shopping Lists:
A good shopping list is a critical component of a successful DIY project. While viewing external content,
users are able access and edit thier notes and shopping lists without needing to navigate away from the
resource.
Comments with Added Value:
User comments can add a lot of valuable insight for other users, especially on a
platform devoted to trying new things (and learning from mistakes).
User interviews revealed that DIYers frequently rely on commentary from other users. To help them find the most relevant insights, user comments can be voted up or down just like projects. Comments can then be sorted by the most up-voted, the most recent, or users can choose to view only comments from other users who have already completed a particular project themselves.
Reader View to Filter out the Noise:
MYDIY is focused heavily on external content which may contain a lot of extraneous filler, ads or
may not be properly formated for mobile browsing.
Reader view allows users to eliminate some of the clutter so that they can focus on their project without distractions.
Updated Save Button:
During testing, users liked the task-oriented nature of the check box but did not
immediately recognize it as a "save" button.
The check box was replaced with a "+" icon that rotates into a "star" when the project is saved. The iconography is both a more common pattern and a subtle DIY reference - something that users may recognize as a Phillips screw head changing to a Torx screw head.
With the MVP complete, the most important next step is testing the product with a wider audience and making adjustments based on early user feedback. Beyond that, user research uncovered lots of interesting opportunities for development. 2 of the most interesting possibilities:
Some users interviewed want the ability to show off their finished projects and all users wanted to see the finished projects from other users to get additional inspiration and advice. There’s a strong opportunity to lean into the social capacity of this product.
DIY projects sometimes come with a lot of moving parts to consider and manage. Budgeting tools, project management and advanced organizational features could add considerable value for users in future iterations of the product.
MYDIY was a bit of a passion project for me. I love making things, figuring out how to solve a problem, and the act of building, but it's hard to find good guidance for a lot of projects online and this is a product that I would really love to exist in the world
The problem with passion is that it can sometimes lead to bias. There were things that I felt sure about white developing the prototype that turned out not to work for other users during testing. Removing my own bias and really focusing on user needs was critical to the evolution of this app and it definitely made for a stronger product in the end.
The other problem with passion is that it can lead to a bloated MVP. There were so many ideas that I wanted to include in this product. Not all of them made the cut, but perhaps too many did. I may have gone slightly overboard for the MVP, but as far as the passion goes, I have no regrets.
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