Upgrading Selections
Role: Associate Product Designer (UX Research, UX & UI Design) • Project Timeline: June - September 2022
A prototype utilizing a vendor’s website metadata and tagged elements to identify and scrape product information on their page, making builders’ selections workflows quicker.
When a builder is working with a client to build them their dream home, one of the most important sets of details to get sign-off on is the selections.
Selections refer to decisions that a homeowner must make on the visual or structural items in the house (ie. plumbing fixtures, lighting fixtures, paint colors). A selection is made up of choices, which are the options of that selection (ie. ‘Kohler chrome faucet’ vs. ‘Moen brass faucet’).
The builder uses Buildertrend’s selections feature to present these choices to the client, and get sign-off on their final decisions. The builder can then request the materials from vendors and get bids from subcontractors, all the while producing invoices, purchase orders, and change orders - all feeding into their estimate and budgets.
Where Can We Help?
Depending on the type of home build, the level of detail the homeowner gets to decide could be very little, or be extremely involved. In a perfect world, all builders are spec builders, where they can create a templated job that they can copy and paste into multiple projects. Realistically, it is more common for builders to be custom or ‘semi-custom’ meaning the owner has some type of power over choosing exactly what they are looking for; they are not picking from a curated list.
Collaborating with the materials team, my PM and I started user research to unravel why such an important feature has such minimal usage.
The Issues: Initial Research & Discovery
While our CX repository did offer some insight into customers issues with our selections feature, we took what we could and decided to wipe the slate clean and go into discovery with an open mind. Over the course of 2 months, we conducted 40 interviews with Buildertrend users from all over the world (some as far as Australia). As expected, we had an abundant amount of feedback that we organized into Enjoy HQ and started mapping out the big “buckets” of pain points. During this time, we were able to rapidly iterate and narrow down where we could provide the most value.
The reason we divided the information up into these buckets is that while there are many issues we discovered, they do all full under bigger parts of the process. And within selections, if a user cannot create a selection, they definitely will not be editing, managing, sharing them, or doing much else afterwards. Keeping this in mind, we were able to cull the information down to a few important insights about Creating Selections.
Customers believe their business could benefit greatly from Buildertrend integrating with external websites (like Build(.)com) in order to more quickly import selections & subsequent choices.
They want the ability to organize and replicate commonly used selections in a "library" or "catalog" format for various types of builds, styles, rooms in homes, and "sub-selections" in order to save time when working from one job to the next.
They struggle with the time-consuming transition from the physical showroom, meetings, and PDFs to adding & releasing selection choices for approval within Buildertrend.
Users appreciate the usefulness of templates, but can get frustrated with the time it takes to build them or keep them updated.
There is a divide in users who believe that the Selections feature is only useful for record-keeping, users that want to be able to add all “options” possible within each selection, and users who feel they have a better system on their own.
The overarching theme: The majority of Buildertrend customers feel the process of creating selections is time-consuming. Users don’t want to create selections because it is too hard and takes too long for them to truly make useful.
With all of this research and exposure, we were able to identify the different types of users, why they were using it, the order they were using it, and the way that they were using it.
One unfortunate consequence of this is we found that not only does everyone use this feature differently, but many users have aptly curated their selections in a way that works perfectly for them and ONLY them. The more interviews we did, the less patterns we saw in the usage from builder to builder - and that was almost mind-boggling! What they were craving, in addition to an overall better user experience, was the ability to customize the feature to their needs.
Better, Faster, Stronger
With our first round of iterations, we focused entirely on how we could make creating selections faster.
Solution Flow #1: Choices with Variations
Where the choice has custom fields (not the selection). This option would replace the need to duplicate the same choice multiple times into the same project if there are multiple colors or sizes.
Solving for: Customers having to create a brand new choice for every color or size, instead of one choice with 3 variations.
Solution Flow #2: Quick Copy & Quick Delete
Where you have the option to “quick copy” and “quick delete” from the main view of selections. The only option for delete and copy before was via selecting the checkboxes and selecting “checked actions.”
Solving for: When needing to quickly delete or copy choices instead of use a convoluted process that includes checkboxes and mass actions.
Solution Flow #3: Import selections from source template OR job + being able to select specific selections instead of ‘all’ from one place
Currently, the “Import Selections” option in selections only allows you to import items from source templates, not jobs. This creates an extra step for the builder where they have to create a template from a job, even if that is not necessary for them.
Solving for: The manual process that is involved in importing templated sets of selections.
Solution Flow #4: A Chrome Extension for Importing Selections
This extension would pull selection choices (including data & photos) from external websites.
Solving for: The gruesomely long & manual process that is pulling selection data from websites and typing it into the modal. Every piece of data must be copied or typed from scratch.
Solution Flow #5: An Integration of QR Codes in Showrooms for Mobile
Contractors can add QR codes into their showrooms and their selections database so a customer walking through a showroom and quickly make selection choices in-person.
Solving for: The vigorous effort of a GC or designer when bringing their customers through a warehouse and needing to keep track of their selections.
Solution Flow #6: Editable Data Tables/Multi-Add
Would allow builders to quickly add selections and choices without opening and closing modals to do so.
Solving for: Needing to utilize selections as if it was an excel spreadsheet that you need to make your way through quickly, and not a one-by-one process.
Technical Feasibility
Working with our architecture and scrum teams, we took these 6 solutions and conducted a DVF analysis (Desirable - Feasible - Viable) and assumptions mapping on each to see which we were best to move forward with.
The two solutions that stood out were both centered around the ease of pulling in selections from other websites (ex. Home Depot, Lowes, Build.com). We knew this would provide the most value as quickly as possible to the theme of ‘creating’ selections and making the manual process much faster.
Option 1: A BT Chrome Extension
A Chrome extension would provide the most easy and accurate way of pulling or scraping data from other websites, and would give the user more control of their experience as they never have to leave their browsing of selections to do so.
Cons: Development time, maintenance of an external browser extension, bugs/defects, and the fear it would not work properly (populate data correctly).
Option 2: URL Population Tool
The ability for a user to populate selection or choice data by pasting the link into the selections modal would change very little about their original process and require less development resources, but still provide a mass amount of customer value.
Cons: The solution exists inside Buildertrend. Customers will be on websites and still need to flip back and forth between multiple windows to accomplish the same thing.
Final Options & Prototypes
Chrome Extension: The developers on our team were looking to use tags on the backend to identify the different categories of content. From there, the user can populate automatically or do a ‘guided selection’ process which would allow them to hover over the sets of content and populate it directly.
URL Populating Tool: Developers could use the same backend methods as the chrome extension to scrape the data but not need to put forth the effort to build something external to the platform.