Mybuilder.com

Web / Mobile

Project Overview

Mybuilder.com are a popular marketplace service that connect homeowners with tradespeople across Europe.

This project involved the design of chat assistant feature to enable improved marketplace communication between homewowner and tradesperson

My responsibilities

Senior Designer

My responsibilities as lead designer involved setting strategic design direction, full stack UI/UX, setting a/b tests, and user research.
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Sept 2023 — Jan 2024

Design hypothesis and testing

Research suggested that tradespeople do not know when best to suggest home visits to quote on listed jobs. Chat between the two parties then sits stagnant and the job is often lost.

By introducing 3rd party chat facilitation messages (as mybuilder.com) between homeowners and tradespersons, conversations will happen at the relevant time in the process home visits and job conversions will increase.

We introduced controlled a/b testing which sent facilitated messages at different points to test which time periods converted a final job acceptance better.

Research questions

When designing this feature it was vital to ask specific questions as regards the behaviour of the tradesperson and homeowner through the job process. Interviews and research were able to answer the following design questions:

What is the average time period of a hire from initial contact?

What is the average time of completing a job from initial contact?

How long are specific jobs classed as in progress?

What percentage of conversations do not result in a hire?

How many messages are sent on average for successful and successful job hires?

Design problem - No idea of when to faciliatate

We had no idea of when to send facilitation messages and at what stages of the process tradespeople were looking to quote and invoice homeowners.

Design problem - Conversation sits dormant

Chat is currently static and does not suggest specific actions at logical points in order to facilitate and encourage conversion. Data showed that jobs that sat dormant for more than a few days rarely converted.

Design overview

Upon shortlisting a tradesperson a chat opportunity is created. Chat's often sat dormant with neither party seeing it as their responsibility to send the first message.

Introducing the parties

Design overview

Research showed that jobs that involved a home visit to quote often had higher conversion rates.

Home visits often didn't happen as tradespeople didn't suggest or enquire about availability at the correct point in the conversation.

After initial introductions were sent and both parties had sent a message, chat facilitation prompted the idea of a site visit - automatically sending the homeowner a time slot calendar. This period was vital in moving forward the chances of job conversion.

Prompting a home visit

Design approach

A core problem with the model of the Mybuilder marketplace was that conversation was often taken offline after the initial introduction and data was hard to gather in terms of job completion rates.

Asking the tradesperson what the status of the job was after 7 days if chat inactivity allowed for much better progress tracking and the ability to push for the request of reviews - a visit part of a tradespersons portfolio on the marketplace.

Checking on job status

Design approach

Research showed that a detialed reviews section on a tradespersons portfolio much improved the chances of winnign and ocnverting a job.

After confirmation was received on the job completion, it was prompted that the tradesperson requested a review of their services from the homeowner. Without this prompt, testing showed that reviews of completed jobs were often now requested and therefore lost.

Prompting for a review

So, why not take a look at my next case study?