Hearth is an all-in-one business toolkit that automates and digitizes processes for home improvement professionals, empowering them to focus on what they do best- home improvement. Net new projects I worked on included an invoicing workflow, insights for admins, and a banking product.
The invoicing tool would ultimately allow contractors to have a more automated process, moving away from pen and paper. Current invoicing processes for contractors were very manual- handwritten invoices took a long time to fill out, and payments were often delayed because homeowners could only pay in cash.
I worked closely with the product development team to build and test designs for an end-to-end invoicing experience that allowed contractors to digitally send out invoices on both the mobile app and on web. They could manage invoices on the go, keep track of who owed them money, and get paid instantly via digital payments.
Within the first few months of release, we saw product usage increase by 20%. However, one piece of feedback repeatedly brought up by contractors was how long it took them to send out an invoice. A point of friction in the flow was adding line items. Contractors weren't able to quickly send out invoices to their clients in person because adding individual line items took a long time.
Challenges:
The current flow to add a line item lived within an already-long "Send" flow within a quote, contract, or invoice. On average, it took contractors more than 5 minutes to fill out one send flow. Fixing our line items experience was a feature that had been asked for a lot from our contractors, but getting alignment from the team to build out this feature was a challenge because of the size of the project.
Approach:
We needed to collectively acknowledge problems with the line items flow, share concerns about a project of this scale, and uncover requirements for finding solutions. I led the team in a design sprint to achieve this. I planned and facilitated a one-hour discussion with the product management and eng leads on the core product team, which culminated in intensive design and testing sessions. The concepts from this design sprint created the shared principles and goals needed to make the project a success. Several major product ideas from the sprint would reshape not only the Send flow, but also create a brand new line item management tool and a paradigm for a new client management tool.
Eliminate redundant content & steps
Because the Send flow was such a high-intent surface, we had crammed the flow full of information we wanted to make sure the contractor was able to collect from clients. I worked with the team to determine which parts of the flow were necessary to keep and which could be moved to other product surfaces.
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I built a fuzzy search experience with a separate web-based line items management tool, which performed better in prototype-testing than an in-flow line items management experience because it reduced the friction of quickly adding saved line items.
This resulted in dramatically-increased Invoices Activation rates (activation is completing the Invoicing set-up flow and sending out 2 invoices within the first 60 days) as well as a much shorter time to fill out invoices (average 3 minutes).
