Talo – the home renovation lab. – Iman

January 21, 2019

Talo – the home renovation lab.

My role – user experience designer & visual designer.

Tools – hand drawn wireframes, Sketch, Lucidcharts

Defining the gap

Talo is a French start-up’s with a simple goal: removing the clutter and black-boxing in the home renovation process, by making it transparent, convenient, and effortless.

They came to me to help build a version they could win investors over with. How? With a clean, simple interface that would make the daunting process of home renovations feel effortless, transparent, and actually kinda fun. Shortly after I started, they got selected to work with a famous incubator that provided their own design team. This cut our collaboration short, but I still wanted to show you some of the work I’ve done for them because hey – cool project, huh?

Understanding the context

Personas

the reluctant rookie – not familiar with construction work, unsure of where to start, and dreading the stress of the process

the hopeful creator – looking to enhance their interior, expecting the ability to switch between different options and get expert recommendations.

Resulting design decisions

Making the user feel at ease – by ensuring the information they need is directly accessible every step of the way, and by using a conversational, no-jargon tone. The objective was to help the user see Talo as a familiar tool making renovation work feel effortless.

“What does this mean to someone who just wants to redo something in their home?” – keeping a value-focus and making sure all information on display helped the user understand the value and impact of each feature on their project, instantly.

Promoting and facilitating customization – to help the user be in control of the process and frankly, bring the fun into home renovations.

Designing the solution

I started by going through the different levels of customization available, and the features/goals for each with the founding team so that I could outline a flow.

At this point, I had set out that users would be ordering windows for a given room. So I created a flow where they would select how many windows they wanted of each type, then customize each window, and finally order the total.

This first flow relied on users knowing from the start how many windows they needed, and having a room-per-room approach (where some might wish to order for several rooms at a time, making this original process overwhelming).

I revised it (see below) so that users would create a project (e.g. “Emma’s room”, “House windows”, or “broken windows”), select a window, customize it, and have it added to their project. This more granular approach makes customization less daunting, as window creation is broken down into smaller, easily manageable chunks. It is also made much faster since users can create one, and duplicate it.

Sketches

Then for quick, numerous iterations with low investment – I hand-sketched different layout options for each step of the customization flow.

Wireframes

I then moved from this phase of option generation, to a phase of decision-making. I selected, integrated and enhanced the key functionalities, and used Sketch to translate these sketches into medium-fidelity wireframes. Having a digital version of the basic elements gave me the possibility to create reusable elements and the room to explore how the components would work individually and collectively.