Context
A startup focused on providing a digital platform to hire butlers, who take care of household errands
Hey Steward is an app that connects customers with butlers to handle household errands like laundry, grocery shopping, dog walking, and cleaning, all based on user preferences. Our goal is to save user’s time on their weekly tasks, so they can focus on what matters most.
Challenge
How can we design a trustworthy,
user-friendly platform that facilitates the hiring of individuals to perform household errands, ensuring that users feel safe and confident granting access to their homes?
Biggest challenge of designing a digital product that especially deals with people coming into your house is to build enough trust and making the customers feel confident.
On the other hand it also applies to butlers to be able to work with straightforward instruction regarding the assignment and expectations are set clear.
Research & Insights
Insights gathered indicated that creating the product to be trustworthy, safe and have transparent communication are the key foundations
The CEO and I led an extensive research sprint, focused on finding trustworthy and essential experiences. After independent research gathering, it was clear that we needed to have 2 path of flows for customers and butlers, before we begin layout the flows we articulated the user persona for the customer and butler pointing out the goals and probable pain points.
Jacob Diaz
45yrs, Trading Manager
Background
Jacob is a single parent with 2 kids who go to elementary school and are often at home. He has a very busy schedule throughout the week and has to travel often, which makes it hard for him to spend time on errands or with his kids. He doesn’t want to spend time doing errands on the weekends and instead wants to spend time with his kids.
“My weekends should be for my kids, but I'm often stuck catching up on household tasks instead”
Goals
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Pain Points
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Average customer profile with the most repeated goals and frustrations
Katerine Oles
32 yrs, Professional Butler
Background
Katerine is a professional steward in hospitality industry with 5 yrs experience in steward services. She strives to gain her client’s trust by maintaining a professional and respectful demeanor, which encourages repeat business and long-term relationships. She seeks to balance her income sources by better use of her time.
“I need a way to optimize my time and enable more income sources”
Goals
Make better use of her time and providing multiple services and build long-term relationships.
Wants to have more control on her work life balance.
Pain Points
Finds it hard to set expectations with clients on services provided.
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Average butler profile with the most repeated goals and frustrations
Drawing on the user personas which were based on the interviews we did with the potential customer and butlers, we realised the onboarding and the booking process needs to be as fluid as possible in order to effectively serve the purpose of saving time for both use cases, from the customer and the butler.
Considering the two use cases of the platform, we had two paths with the same aesthetics. The Onboarding was a very crucial step to provide solid verification which creates trust and establish the preferences and specific requirements so that the matching process can be as perfect as possible.
Ideation
With clear priorities on pathway through detailed onboarding and preference alignment matching between butler and customer we begin wireframing for communication and validation of our strategy
Our approach was to craft a preference gathering onboarding experience that led into a personalized hub with a clear pathway of adding errands along with detailed instructions, followed by availability-based butlers listing, and ending on selecting butler and scheduling the assignment.
Building out the rest of the flow in wires, the vision was slowly coming to life. We tested the usability of our flows through wireframes which helped us realise the effort and also provide our stakeholders with information that they needed to start building.
Branding
The Visual language was formed based on the real world butler dressing aesthetic and the essence of minimalism
For the branding, we drew parallels between real world butler dressing aesthetic and modern UI trends which were very minimalism centered. This variety of inspiration was great for creating a design language that feels professional, trustworthy and modern.
Initial designs
A seamless experience of setting up profiles and errands for customers and butlers and let the platform match with the best fit
With the product strategy and UI style established, I started implementing the designs in high fidelity. I crafted the onboarding experience, prioritizing big, simple type, well-executed creature comforts like progress bars and selection boxes, and incorporated minimal yet impactful illustrations. Additionally, I introduced tasteful color blocking to enhance the overall aesthetic.
Feedback & iterations
Customer engagement was lacking and there were multiple phone calls regarding not being able to see the task status
With a preference alignment match and clear communication between the butler and the customer we included a on going errand feature with live status updates to keep the users engaged and feel aware of the assignment on both ends.
Final designs
A modern simple to use platform to book professional butlers that provide efficient errand services for effortless household management and save time.
The updated product was successful in better customer response and more engaged butlers. There has been a significant improvement in the number of customers booking tasks. We wanted to keep the customers engaged and enhanced the exisiting customers experience by making it even simple to re-book the same butler they’ve had before or even a new one without inputing all the new information regarding the errands.
Also, additional feedback regarding having media options to upload images and voice instructions which were pointing towards a more effective communication between the customer and butler were also included to create an absolute path for both users.
Learnings
Lessons and Improvements
Despite the project being a big one, and me being the only hands on designer it was a strong challenge considering it my first design job, nevertheless we pulled together and got through it. It was cool to see how our ideas for the product, UX, and UI all clicked. I'm proud of what we achieved, even though we had our fair share of startup challenges and late-night work sessions. I would’ve spent more time on gather test results from the first roll out and get more insights on the user experience.
