My internship at Livspace, an interior design/e-commerce giant, was my first foray into the world of UX. There, I was challenged to tackle a concept they’d been considering for a while: a solution to expand their digital presence to make interior design easier to do and engage with for a regular customer—a product that would enable them to compete with other companies in the space. I got the opportunity to lead the project end-to-end, from research to ideation to design, mostly on a solo basis but with the insight and oversight of the UX team. To better frame the problem...
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Research
Market Analysis
I started with market research to identify the business’ needs and a market gap we're trying to address that gap is what I used to extract the problem statement I had identified. Here, I tried to lay out in concrete terms why the company exists, and how cool the company was (it's a three-sided marketplace that connects designers, suppliers and customers, all on its own platform...) so I could understand the domain better.
Research
Competitive Analysis
To get more depth, I did a competitive analysis on six products in the market, which entailed playing around with them to figure out what I liked and what I wasn't keen on as a user. One of them was the IKEA Place app (the most extensive solution in the pool) and I did a deep dive on that, analyzing user flows that one falls into to accomplish different tasks in the app to get inspired and learn from its mistakes. That analysis gave me the material to identify key trends and gaps across these solutions to help inform what I was going to be creating.
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Research
Stakeholder Interviews
Looking at other apps only goes so far, though. I needed to have some real conversations with people to understand a more human perspective on the problem space. Because I was pressed for time, I wasn't able to interview a user directly (though I would have liked to). But I was lucky enough to have conversations with and interview a variety of stakeholders in the domain—product managers, the tech team and the marketing team. They gave me a lot of insights from their own years-long experience with the customer base, and not only did I get a better picture of who our users were, I also got key pieces of info about what kinds of solutions would actually be feasible to develop, beneficial to the business and marketable.
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Research
Fly-On-The-Wall Observing
Interestingly, I ended up figuring out how to interact with the users another way—with some good old fly-on-the-wall observation. That way, I get to see how users naturally behave in their environment, without needing to rely on their own, potentially inaccurate recollection of their experience. Livspace has a number of showrooms for home design solutions called Experience Centers, and customers frequented those places to have conversations with designers and get acquainted with the interior design world. One day, I went to an Experience Center, notebook in hand, to listen to actual users running through these design conversations and observe their behavior IRL.
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User Personas & Journeys
Constructing The User
Thanks to the insights I gained in that process, I could get cracking on outlining some user personas and their journeys. With a pen and some A3 sheets, I generated a number of personas & their corresponding journeys for different types of customers that lived in a world where my product didn't exist. (As I discovered, a rather cumbersome and exhausting one that was).
After a review with the UX team, I settled on one primary persona and journey, and I zeroed in.
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Ideation & Planning
Thinking About Problems & Solutions
From these personas, I identified key pain points in the entire journey, both particular (friction at specific points in the journey) and holistic (deficiencies in the overall experience). In general, people trying to get involved in interior design have a rough go of it because there are so many barriers to entry - the methods are difficult to work with for a beginner, any tools require a lot of training and working with an interior designer can leave people feeling powerless in the process. That gave me the groundwork for an ideation session to create opportunities and solutions for those pain points, all laid out in the form of a feature list.
To organise them into an actual structure, I laid an initial overall information architecture for the app, with thoughts on what to consider for future iterations. The final iteration was a bit different, though, as through the design phase I kept revisiting & adjusting for different structures. However, I'm still thankful I did that first, since it still provided a great starting point.
User Flows
Flow Architecture & Wireframing
I started out by sketching ideas on paper for flows and even wireframes to imagine how they may look & get a visual sense of structure going. I like working on paper for a lot of my initial ideas (even if the drawings are a mess) because of the ease of getting down an idea and then iterating on it. I ended up refining certain user flows, and then I moved on to high-fidelity wireframing, looking at a couple of conceptual structures that all needed a first pass.
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The rest of the UX team gave me iterations of feedback on the design & information architecture of the app (from the perspective of a user, as they hadn’t been invested in the actual creation of the design), and I kept making adjustments based on their suggestions. And as a result, I ended up with the mockups below.
Design
Yourspace: Final Look
Below is the UI I constructed for the project. For the visual design I used Livspace's own design system & style guide as a major reference point, with adaptations for shades, visual hierarchy, and iconography - particularly, adapting it to a mobile interface.
Let's say you want to start browsing through the design catalog.
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You've found something neat, and now you want to see how it looks in your space.
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You're going around and you see something you like IRL - now, you want to find something equivalent in the catalog:
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Now, let's look at the Gallery and see how it stores all the interior design ideas we can come up with.
INTERACTION ANIMATIONS COMING SOON!
Closing Thoughts
Some Takeaways
This internship with the team at Livspace gave me an incredible onboarding experience to the world of UX and product. It was my first time handling a project like this, and at points I honestly couldn't envision finishing a project of this scale as a first-timer. Their consistent support in the entire process helped me get it over the finish line, and it felt so fun to be working in a team of creative & intelligent people—to be honest, I didn't know work could be this fun.
I understood how methodical creating an experience for a user could be hands-on, when previously I'd only really interacted with the world through articles and write-ups. This project took me through the steps of understanding a user, and the myriad ways you can generate insights about what their world is colored by. Leveraging those insights to create architectures, flows and designs illuminated to me how "form follows function" is an important rule. But to be honest, the most valuable skill I learned was how to come up with workarounds when you're under pressure and constraints. There was a time limit in each part of this process, and I was balancing a family health emergency simultaneously—a lot of facilities like arranging user interviews weren't available, so I had to keep adapting in a pinch. I figure that's a skill that's going to come in handy throughout my professional life.
For the future, there are a few capabilities that I had come up with through ideation that I would definitely like to integrate into this design (for example, the ability to customize simulated lighting with the AR camera, or facilitating sharing designs with other users). Currently, the Livspace team is using my project as a reference for a number of new operations, and I'd be onboard if they decide to build a product like this out—it would be interesting to get to test the design a bit more.
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