iHD Layout Refresh

The Product.

iHD (In-Home Design) is a scaled-down version of the robust CAD tool that our in-house system designers use. The original intent of iHD was to allow sales reps to work with the homeowner to build their ideal system. It works mostly as a sales tool, but it also streamlines some of our processes. For instance, instead of running these “layouts” through multiple re-designs with our in-house designers, the rep can make live changes with the customer.

The tool is accessed by our door to door reps (on an iPad) and our inside sales reps (on a desktop).

The Problem.

The original tool was simpler and did less. Over the past year, there have been many added functionalities, making the initial layout obsolete. The two major elements of the screen were creeping off the bottom edge (see above) and more requests were coming in.

Secondarily, I felt that the overall design could be better. It was like someone built a simple shed then tacked more rooms on and added electricity and plumbing, and all without re-thinking the layout. Ideally, if you want a small home instead of a shed, you would start from the beginning. I decided to use this “green light” to propose more sweeping changes.

The Information Panel.

My first plan was to solve the problem of the Information Panel on the left. I knew that the reps like to use the pill alone, with the panel closed, while building the system (it fills as they add panels), but I didn’t know whether they were also opening the panel for reference at some point in the process.

So I started polling users. Our SI (Sales Innovation) Team is a pool of users that we regularly access because they are actively using iHD and our other sales tools.

I polled over 15 users and asked, “How often do you access and use this additional information? Rank from 1–5, 5 being ALL THE TIME.”

The results I got back surprised me. This is a relatively information-dense section of the tool. The average score was a 3.65, with a median score of 4.

Persona Factoid: Our reps often talk about how being mindful of time spent on each account is important to their process. First, spending too much time limits how many doors they can knock in a day. Second, customers grow increasingly restless as time passes and might need to cut the consultation short out of necessity if they have somewhere else to be.

This means reps are often using the carrot to open and close the Details Panel.

With reps looking to move speedily through the process, I wanted to test another hypothesis that they weren’t using ALL the information, just some of it. If that was true, I thought I might be able to design with MOST accessed information in mind.

I sent out a one-question, quick survey to the team. It looked like this.

I got 18 responses within an hour.

There were some clear trends. Most of our users were accessing five data points “often.” Some were accessing one other point (maximum offset) often. A few were accessing the other five often.

These results also surprised me. My mental model was that there were many of the items in this information panel that were not being used often.

My Conclusion.

It became clear that my previous ideas about this panel having superfluous information were wrong. The reps were referencing all of the details and were using them to do their jobs. I decided to simply re-format and organize the panel so that it was easier to read and also deal with the issue of the size of the panel.

First Stab.

I began by just laying things out, left aligned, in more of a table format.