Home Decorating & Design Ideas for Your New Home

Freshome

After your move, how do you get your new place looking great? Freshome was created to save you money on designing your new space. We offer articles, DIY's, inspiration, and design advice.

My role

Lead Designer

Team

2 Designers, 2 Engineers, 1 Writer, 1 UX Designer

Business Goals

Our parent company had purchased the Freshome brand to help with the SEO content and ranking of our MyMove Learning Hub. It was my responsibility as the lead designer to successfully merge these brands while still making the Freshome experience unique.

Update the brand with a new design system and usability map. We wanted to keep the Freshome UI consistent with its roots, but update the design and user experience to industry standards.

Consolidate the articles and content into an easy to use navigation and focus on specific topics. We didn’t want to cover all of the possible articles, we wanted to narrow the MVP down to 7-8 options.

Revamp the UI for mobile design. Through testing we discovered 87% of our users were on mobile and the current site was not responsive. We created rules that would govern the interaction of the content for a better user experience.

Chapter 1

Think

The Brand

RV had purchased Freshome to add to our company’s portfolio with the direct expectation that it would support our MyMove product (see previous project). With that understanding, we kept the brand name as is and planned to ignite a redesign of the product.

The Challenge

The original site for Freshome was clunky and not mobile responsive. Our initial site testing showed that 78% of the users were on a mobile platform, so designing from a mobile first standpoint was key. We brainstormed and listed out the most important values that could be converted from the old design, and introduced new concepts that could take the product to the next level.

My Role

I was the lead designer responsible for this project and directed the research, building of the case study, and wireframing sessions. I produced sketches, wireframes, and mockups. I delivered final assets and documents, and presented to stakeholders after hitting specific design and business goals during the life of the project.

Gathering inspiration

I spent time digging through websites dealing with home improvement to gauge the best UI that we could use for inspiration. I also went deeper into websites from other industries that were article heavy. I was curious on how they portrayed sponsored content versus basic articles. I noted sites that had navigation built into the side versus tags at the top and how they reacted in mobile versus desktop view.

Chapter 2

Make

Sketching out ideas

After flushing out our goals with the stakeholders and aligning on our deliverables, I began sketching several iterations. Since the product was going to rely heavily on articles, I wanted to portray as many different concepts on what that could look like. The inspiration from the competitive analysis became extremely useful here as I could disregard ideas that would be too flashy or impractical.

Building Wireframes

We focused on three high valued concepts after we tested against other ideas laid out during the precursor sketching exercises. We felt that these three versions provided the best user experience and visual representation of our goals. These were presented to the stakeholders and we vigorously went through the strengths and weaknesses of each concept.

Chapter 3