When EcoHouz first contacted us, they were using a non-responsive Shopify website to sell house plans. Unfortunately, the eCommerce part of the website was not taken care of properly and the shop had massive UX issues, with no price displayed, no option to purchase, no pictures of the products and so on...

Evidently, these problems led EcoHouz to not being able to sell properly. Thus, they contacted us to rebuild their website entirely. 

Competitive Analysis

First, we dove into EcoHouz's market environment, and carried out a full competitive analysis of their business. We studied value propositions, tone of voice, market segmentation, customer demand, pricing, and more...

We divided EcoHouz's competitors into two categories:

1. Businesses with similar audience, and
2. Competitors within the same industry.

This dichotomy - we felt - was crucial as it allowed us to gauge what the future users wanted, what they could expect, and the kind of CX we were competing with. This would, in turn, allow us to adapt to these standards and allow us to convert our audience into customers.

‍

‍

Next, through a set of user interviews with 2 architects in the United States and 2 of their clients, we established a hierarchy of customer demand highlighting how prefabricated housing could compete against more traditional housing. These would come in handy when defining the problem space and how to answer it by addressing user's needs and demands more adequately than their competition.

‍

‍

Figuring out how the users come to make a purchase

We had the users' needs laid out when it came to prefabricated housing. Now it was time to learn more about what they look for on the web, how they hear about new trends, and how they navigate the web when making a purchase.

We also used our user interviews to create new personas for our project. These same personas were later used for building the website.

Information Architecture for House Plans - How Do We Make it Work?

One thing we learned for sure about House Plans is, there is A LOT of information to cover. Number of rooms, square foot, requirements, materials, time... these are all information we know to be crucial to a potential user when browsing different house plans in helping them make an informed decision before a purchase. Moreover, when you factor in environmental concerns, particularly with respect to materials, requirements, repurposing ec, you're looking at a whole range of information competing with each other in grabbing the user's attention.

Thus, in order to prioritize effectively, we had to make a choice. Through another set of interviews, we asked users and non-users to list and prioritize what information they're looking at when looking for a home to live in. This data was sufficient in helping us draft the low and mid-fidelity wireframes for the product page and product category page. We knew what the users were looking for, so we helped them navigate a list of analogous products fast and efficiently.

Key Result: Securing Partnerships

One of the key objective our client had indicated prior to taking on this project was to be able to show architecture firms what his business would accomplish for them.

In short, EcoHouz wanted to secure partnerships with architecture firms, where he would make the house plans, and the people searching for house plans, meet in one place.

This was a success as, merely a month after our project was complete, EcoHouz wrote to us to announce they had managed to secure a partnership with a Sydney architecture firm after showcasing their website and pitch deck to them!