Rapid Prototyping & Evaluation

Contractor Pro (Logicel)

I researched and built prototype improvements for an in-development app and analyzed the results to guide further improvements.

Key Deliverables

Role

UX Designer & Researcher

Client

Contractor Pro (Logicel)

Competitive Audit, Rapid Prototyping, Kano Analysis User Journey Map, Sketches/Wireframe

Methods

Research & Design

Empathize

Logicel Solutions offers dynamic web and mobile solutions for the trades industry. Their flagship product, Contractor Pro, helps small and medium-sized trades businesses streamline job and worker management, freeing up owners' time and reducing stress.

Currently, Logicel is using a working MVP (minimal viable product) version of Contractor Pro to gather feedback. The next iteration is in the design phase, offering a chance for innovative improvements that simplify the lives of busy trades business owners and their contractors.

Context

The design team held a zoom meeting with two of the founding members, one long time contractor who came up with the concept and the lead software engineer, of Contractor Pro to hear their long term visions for the product, as well as any initial feedback they had received, and what specific goals they had in mind that we could help address.

Background

The first bit of information they wanted to establish was their user group and target demographics. Contractors that are looking for easy management of their work & don’t have time for difficult processes or requirements on top of their already busy schedules. According to their experience, “this group is typically tech-averse or has low technical experience” and may feel some resistance to changing the way they have done things for years.

Persona

Define

With that information set, they felt that they had a few specific main proposals that they thought features could focus on which would be beneficial to the app experience:

Stakeholder Goals

  1. Focusing on the contractor side of interaction

  2. Improving the Onboarding Experience in the App, specifically how they could make it as intuitive as possible for a tech-averse audience

  3. Exploring AI options to improve the workflow, “ability for AI to serve as a secretary for customers”

  4. Implementing the ability to convert “unstructured notes” into a task, new user profile, or job request

User Journey Map

Prior to our meeting with the stakeholders, I performed an evaluation of the current user journey for Contractor Pro. The goal of this evaluation was to determine where I felt the pain points of the current experience were, and simulate how a user might think or feel when experiencing the current version.

Ideate

Collaborating with the larger designed team, we each created five to seven low fidelity design prototypes (over 70 concepts in total) focusing on opportunity areas identified through our research.

Feature Cards

Following the concepting stage of the design process, we relinked with the software lead of Contractor Pro and presented the features, which were given a value for technical difficulty to achieve. Our software designer used the fibonacci sequence as a basis for their rating system which becomes incrementally more difficult. Based on this feedback, the design team selected 10 features that either received the most feedback from the stakeholders, or that we thought best fit the original goals.

Selecting Features to Research

Fibonacci Sequence: each number is the sum of the two preceding ones.

I.E. - 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, ....

Additionally, at the end of the session, the engineer provided us with a budget for what they thought would be a feasible amount of features and the effort required to realize them in their development scenario. In order to present a realistic proposal to the development team, we were asked to design and prototype within the constraints of this budget.

Time & Effort Budget

Budget: 10 points

User Testing

A survey containing the 10 selected features was forwarded to 3 contractors related to the development of the Contractor Pro app. In the survey, users were asked to provide desirability ratings for the inclusion of features, as well as whether or not this is something that they would expect to be a part of the app, and how they would feel if this feature was omitted from their user experience.

Using the Kano analysis method, the design team processed and studied the survey results to qualitatively label which features the participants were the most attracted to, expected to be in the product, or indifferent to. This method helped in determining which features might experience diminishing returns in regards to time investment.

Kano Analysis

Prototyping

Based on the two rounds of feedback from the stakeholders, as well as the comments and information from the survey: I knew that I wanted to focus on something more relevant for the contractor side of the experience.

To provide some context, Contractor Pro currently has two different view options: Owner & Contractor. Most of the meat of the content is currently provided on the Owner view, with the Contractor view having essentially no content except for what Owners explicitly send them.

Features 1 & 3 were a combination of my own concept as well as a mix of some of the ideas of my very insightful design team members, while Feature 2 was one of my concepts that was not selected for the initial survey review but was still one that I thought meshed well with the other ideas.

A simple feature to allow users to add tags for skills and industry experience to their profiles and jobs.

In the current model of Contractor Pro, contractors can only gain access to jobs when invited by an Owner and are limited to the broadcasts they are specifically tagged in. In terms of the current scope this makes sense as most Owners are coming with their own crews that they have worked with before.

However, many users commented that they are always looking for new work or new contractors. A simple and visual representation like this can help both sides of the equation with finding jobs and workers.

Selection Criteria: Stakeholder goals & Highly Rated in Surveys

Feature 1: Network & Skills Tagging

A feature which allows users to manually assign a priority level to jobs and tasks in their workflow. Similarly to the tagging system, this would be represented visually on the job cards and users can sort in their job view to see their most pressing jobs and tasks. Users can also sort by planned end date of the project, and the priority tag would override all other filters if toggled on.

While this functionality currently serves the Owner side of the business more than the contractors, the stakeholders told us that one of their biggest client groups at the moment is a group of firefighters that looks for side-gigs and short term jobs in between their shifts, so being able to see which jobs would have quick turnaround and immediate responses would be beneficial to them as well.

Selection Criteria: Stakeholder goals

Feature 2: Priority Sorting

One of the things that the stakeholders mentioned was that a large amount of the materials and communications they receive come in the form of written notes and sketches. This is what originally prompted their request for an AI powered tool which could read and convert the notes into information and was what I originally proposed in my concept. However, in talking with the software engineering lead, they expressed that they were not comfortable or experienced with using AI technology and assigned it an effort rating of two to three times the allotted budget for the project scope.

So in order to remove that AI factor while still maintaining the essence of the idea, I borrowed the idea and functionality from other scanning apps I have used, which automatically detect edges of documents in photos. This would not change any aspect of the contractors’ current work flows, but would also make the “unstructured notes” that they receive look more like official documents, which I felt was a happy medium between the two concepts.

Selection Criteria: Stakeholder goals & Highly rated in User Surveys

Feature 3: PDF Scanning

Next Steps

Based on the defined scope and budget for this phase of development, I feel that this is a good launching point to build upon. The proposed features provides users, more specifically contractors, greater ability to find work and advertise their skills and reducing the headache of processing paperwork and documents.

However, there were a lot of concepts that were left on the table due to the budget for this round of prototypes. I think that many of the lower investment features such as implementing notifications, improving the hierarchy of visual elements, and adding different views to the portal (e.g. calendar view) are also natural progressions that would significantly boost the user experience of the app.

Additionally, one of the main asks from the stakeholders was the inclusion of AI tools, and due to the amount of time and research required to attain these goals was too difficult to realize within the time allotted; this is definitely an area they can research and explore on the side.

For more information, please refer to my full Annotated Wireframe report below.