HouseRX

I was approached by HouseRX founder Ron Fesko to help get them and their team back on track. They were working with a development agency which, while talented, was not able accurately capture the founders vision when it came to the HouseRX experience - The target users, the product flow, and the general presentation. The vision for HouseRX was to create an ecosystem for home-owners and property managers to manage the health of their home at a glance with the assistance of intuitive software and a network of trusted, local technicians. When I joined the project, the current product represented more of an ad-hock scheduling software with most of the responsibility on the clients (home owners) and not enough attention given to the home managers. or the technicians.

The original flow had almost all of the focus on the home owner, and rather than giving them their home at a glance, it provided them with a vague dashboard and the ability to schedule recurring home audits. Since my primary responsibility was to help center the app around the correct end-user, I knew we had to start with identifying the individual user stories/flows for the apps primary users:The Home Manager, the Home Owner and the Technician.

I began with a basic user flow and app walkthrough, identifying the core aspects that this MVP would need. Additionally, I put together a high-level database schema to help me better understand what type of information was going to be flowing through the product, and who would need the most autonomy over the information. Ultimately, I determined that the core user to target for the MVP would be the home-manager. Why not the homeowner? The homeowner derives value from this product by having the confidence that everything in there home is up to date and taken care of. The home manager derives value from this product because no product currently offers this level of control for the property manager; wed be replacing a pen & paper system.

Since we were building an MVP, the property manager was the clear choice to prioritize first. We would eventually curate a separate experience for technicians, but for the meantime, they could use modified version of the property manager experience. The discovery process really helped me to understand the full vision of the product, and I could confidently move forward with brand discovery and prototyping with these personas ironed out.‍

Designing the HRX Dashboard helped me understand everything else that was missing from this experience. Where can users see the status of the items in their home? Where can property managers track maintenance logged by technicians? Where can technicians go to make their inspection and maintenance process faster and more effective? I sought to answer all of these questions, but I first had to start by creating a simple and beautiful dashboard. The images below can help illustrate the iteration process of putting together a dashboard with all relevant information.

The second iteration of the HRX Dashboard was nearly reflective of the final product. From my initial conversations with the HouseRX founding team, the core value of the MVP would allow users to navigate their home from a singular dashboard. This meant everything in their home should be indexable by room and by type of equipment (HVAC, kitchen, plumbing, etc). By shrinking the hero section, we were able to better prioritize the actual contents of the home. The problem with this dashboard was that we were still focusing on the condition/status of certain objects in the home, rather than creating the reliable and predictable maintenance timeline for each type of object in the home.

This has been one of the most meaningful case studies in my career so far. I have really enjoyed taking a half-baked product and changing it for the better. It has also been one of the most challenging projects I have worked on. As I continue to work with the founders and the development team, I will update this case study. I wanted to document my progress thus far to help me visualize and articulate my thought process. Am I asking the right questions? That remains to be seen.