Skills: OOUX, ORCA, information architecture, innovation, journey mapping, customer experience
ISSUE:
The product landscape around home renovations is complex, but the project that I have been doing the past year adds another layer of complexity, and that layer will be a growing problem shortly.
I’ve been renovating my mother’s house from 500 miles away. I’m doing this as she is in assisted living and needs the potential rent on the house to pay for her long-term care.
This project has brought its own set of frustrations with the processes involved with getting work done on houses - often with years of deferred maintenance - in places far from one’s residence. I think that in the next few years, this will be a growing issue as boomers age and will need more in-home and nursing home care. More adult children will need to be able to work on houses remotely once they become caregivers for their parents.
Hiring a local contractor can be prohibitively expensive for such a large project, so what I’ve been doing is using Lowe’s as a contracting partner for many of the projects on the house. I initially chose this route as there are stores both where I live and where she lives. You work with installation experts from Lowe’s, who work with a network of contractors to get projects done. You pay Lowe’s one project fee for both materials and labor, and Lowe’s pays the local contractor once the work is completed.
The main issues that I have experienced as part of this process are that:
Lowe’s is a national chain in the US, but the inventory and payment systems at local stores don’t talk to one another. I wanted to be able to do things like choose flooring at the store near me, but I couldn’t.
Payment options vary wildly depending on the service and I could not pay at the store near me for any of them. This revealed a dark pattern, as Lowe’s really really wants you to pay using one of their credit cards. I’ve been using a HELOC (home equity line of credit) and paying from another state, so my HELOC credit card didn’t work because the amounts were too high. To pay Lowe's, I wrote a check and mailed it to my brother, who would hand deliver it to the local Lowe’s. I can’t see this process being convenient for a lot of people who are trying to renovate houses from afar.
APPROACH:
If you are at all familiar with Object-Oriented UX, communication issues between branches of the same large national chain are made for the ORCA process. However, the problem I just described is so unique that none of my usual discovery tricks got the results I needed. For example, my searches on YouTube for Lowe’s installation service process got me nowhere. A lot of people on YT can tell you about specific Lowe’s installations on their houses, but I found no one talking about the actual buying process which was preventing me from getting to the installation phase.
In short, I had a perfect OOUX-y problem and no noun-foraging sources to examine. I needed to forage for nouns somewhere to build out my system object matrix. In the ORCA process, it starts with the O in the process, which is identified with nouns. Those nouns become your system’s objects, and they provide the basis for the rest of the ORCA process: the relationships between objects, the calls-to-action, and the attributes of each object. In short, I was stuck.
To move forward, I eventually did a remix of the noun foraging process by combining:
- The nouns from Lowe’s installation home page. Warning: there are a LOT of nouns on this page to parse out ;)
- A journey map of my buying process, which had a lot of in-person touchpoints and long phone calls to Lowe’s sales representatives, most of whom specialize in one service.
OOUX Journey map, done in Miro
The columns in my journey map are labeled by each step in the journey and underneath are the objects and metadata that are used in that step in the process. You can see that this journey map is more colorful than usual. Here is a color key:
- BLUE shows objects in the system
- GREEN shows actions the system needs to do
- PINK shows metadata, or how your objects can be found in the system
- YELLOW shows core content, or how objects are visually represented in the system
- ORANGE shows key questions that are opportunities for more research
RESULTS:
To conclude: Yes, you can not only use OOUX and the ORCA process to discover opportunities to solve brand-new problems, but you can also incorporate UX discovery techniques, like journey mapping, into the process to get the data you need to build a system for your solution. The ORCA process makes the tools you already have more powerful and impactful.
This OOUX Journey Map that I did shows that there is value in creating an online tool that could provide statuses to customers on installations and services. Customers could have information about installations at their fingertips, no matter how far away they are from their project house. This information service would save time in reduced calls to customer service and less stress for customers in the long run.
