At Hover, I worked on countless initiatives across nearly every team -- mobile, insurance, platform, commerce, customer experience, growth, design systems, core architecture and 3D.
Over time, my role transitioned into management and leadership. The design team at Hover was just 3 strong when I joined, and during my almost 4 years there, I played a major part in scaling it to 17 amazing people - both IC's and higher level leadership. I had the opportunity to hire and inherit 5 designers that I managed and mentored directly. They ranged from junior to principal across many teams and projects within the company. As a manager my goal is create a trusting and collaborative environment with a healthy feedback culture. This enables designers to do work that has meaningful impact on both the business and our customers.
I also participated in workshops with product and engineering leadership to define our strategy and roadmap at a company level. The teams I currently support are spread across many different key initiatives - mobile, customer experience, insurance & underwriting, 3D and growth. We worked together to define OKRs and goals to deliver against our roadmap. I also led building and rolling out our PED Product Development Process -- the Hover Metro Map -- to increase collaboration, consistency and efficiency across teams.
Hover
Design Studio
Team
Design manager (me)
Product manager
Engineering manager
Principal product designer
4-5 Engineers
Data lead
Stakeholders
Executive team
GTM
Sales
Product marketing
Context
Hover has a 3D design tool which enables you to visualize material design changes, such as siding, windows, roof etc, on your home. Our existing 3D experience is outdated and was built for professionals in the exterior home improvement (EHI) and insurance spaces. Homeowners (consumers) struggle with usability and fail to complete basic tasks.
EHI sales people have a 2.5x higher win rate and revenue per appointment increase by 96% when leveraging the 3D model for the homeowner. By improving the homeowner experience we will increase pro usage and have a big impact on improving both their win rate and revenue.
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Approach
My role was to lead the project from the design perspective. We began by gathering feedback internally from sales, support and customer feedback on the existing tool. After wrapping our heads around the problem we had a virtual design sprint to prototype and test several directions. We were able to validate a huge improvement in usability of the new experiences for both homeowners and professionals. After the design sprint I sourced and hired an amazing contract Product Designer to take over leading the project. I operated at a high-level to provide direction and feedback and also worked with the other leads to keep the executive team and broader company updated. The project was going so well, I hired the contract designer full time as a Principal Product Designer!
Solution
The team built a simple experience informed by research and iteration. Studies were conducted which inform the information architecture and we worked closely with engineering on feasibility, always keeping in mind speed to learn. Designs were validated in lightweight testing and the new experience has rolled out to organic homeowners and pilot EHI orgs.
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Outcomes
Early data showed the system usability score improved from: 41.25% to 95.6%.
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Time to perform a task is on average 76% faster than the old experience. For example changing trim went from taking about 30 seconds to less than 6 seconds.
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Very positive early feedback from both homeowners and professionals participating in the pilot.
Mobile App Redesign
Team
Lead designer (me)
Product manager
Engineering lead
4-5 Engineers
Stakeholders
Executive team
GTM
Sales
Data
Product marketing
My role was to lead, coordinate, and redesign the mobile app end-to-end. This included initial research and documentation into how our existing experience worked across all personas and workflows, and to identify the most problematic UX. I worked closely with product and engineering to understand constraints and prioritize what we would fix and what would wait as the timeline was quick. We started by mapping the current experience and identifying the most critical experience issues.
Next it was onto ideation, wireframes, testing/validation, hifi, go to market planning, release planning, QA and so on. One of the highlights of this project was printing the wireflows on 6 ft tall sheets that covered nearly 100 feet of wall space. I hosted office hour sessions to get feedback and make sure stakeholders were informed of the changes and what was to come.
After about 8 months for research, design, engineering, testing and go to market planning we launched to 10% of our userbase and scaled to 100% over a week. The product manager was one of the best I've ever had the opportunity to work with and we made a great team. It was an extremely challenging project with lots of gotcha's hidden in our legacy app, but we persevered and shipped with almost no bugs or customer complaints.​​​
Improvements:
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Redesigned and delivered nearly 800 screens
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Communicate value prop
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Reduced onboarding steps by half
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Overhauled capture to be more flexible and intuitive
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Improved in app education
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Branding refresh, UX improvements, UI consistency
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Platform to build on top of
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Outcomes:
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Rolled out over a week to 100% of iOS users
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70% opens on new app by end of week
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Sign up to completed capture funnel from 15% to 32%
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Reduced failed jobs by 10%
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Learnings:
Perfection is the enemy of progress
Communicate unknowns early
Teamwork <3
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Choose your own adventure - plan your project metro map. Select the stops appropriate for your problem space. Which train are you on? The express train that only needs to make a few stops, or the local train that needs to explore all the stations along the way? Did you get stuck? Get off the track and loop back.
Hover Metro Map
As we scaled and the number and size of teams grew it became clear we need to define more process around how we work. I began by leading several retro sessions between product and design to better understand the pain points. In the beginning I was just focused on the design process and as I shared with product along the way, they liked the visual metaphor of a metro map and the flexibility of the process and wanted the map reflect the process for all of PED. 🎉
I am testing it across 3 teams for feedback and will then roll out more broadly. After landing on the map I documented the process in a wiki with links to important templates, research archives, decks and examples of previous work.