Friendly, stress-free online access to emergency plumbing solutions.
Setting the scene
The problem
The process started with a small inkling of a problem garnered through my personal experience. The thought was: why is everything associated with plumbing, heating, electrics & gas from a homeowner’s perspective so inefficient, frustrating and painful?
The initial problem that was investigated was: “for most home service issues, why was it so expensive to fix and why does it take so long?”
The hypotheses
I started the discovery process with a few hypotheses for Homeowners - the primary user identified.
Hypothesis 1: Homeowners have plumbing issues around their home, because plumbers are in high demand.
Hypothesis 2: Homeowners do not like paying a premium for plumbers in emergencies, because they are charged at a much higher rate and people do not like paying more.
Hypothesis 3: Homeowners generally feel bad about paying for professional help.
Hypothesis 4: Homeowners often feel they may be getting ‘duped’ by professionals when they received the invoice because they do not understand the costings - there is some informational disconnect leading to low trust.
Prototyping
In true Lean UX fashion, the above hypotheses were distilled into prototypes that were then shown to customers in order to systematically test my assumptions.
Prototyping allowed me to establish that making the booking of trusted plumbers was the #1 priority. I fed this learning into the next prototype.
The prototype also had to be easy to use and as stress-free as possible. This was achieved through streamlined UX, such as quick and easy information collection, but was also achieved through features like imported reviews from trusted rating sites, estimated quotes and estimated time of arrival - all of which promoted trust within the user.
A companion app was also created for the plumbers with aim of increasing engagement on the platform from the supply side.
Validated learning
I started by testing a mobile app that allowed homeowners to video call plumbers to get their issues solved. The perceived benefit of doing it this way was that it would cost less, the homeowner could solve the issue themselves, and they would be able to solve it much sooner as the homeowner did not have to wait for the plumber to turn up.
Many things were learned from having this prototype. The two main takeaways were that:
1) even though the plumber could diagnose the issue and tell the homeowner how to fix it, the homeowner may not have the tools to do the job correctly
2) homeowners did not in fact mind paying a premium if they were sure that a good job would be done.
Overall, in this instance prototyping an actual experience allowed me to gather critical learnings that invalidated some assumptions that I had.