Pro Referral
Pro Referral enables home service pros to receive, view, and respond to service leads (e.g., ceiling fan installation, fence repair) from anywhere. With 40% of store profit coming from pros, it was crucial for Home Depot to enhance the pro experience, encouraging them to shop at Home Depot while connecting customers with quality pros for the products they purchase at store.
As a design lead, I developed a user-centered strategy and delivered key design solutions across multiple features to improve the connection between pros and customers.
User - Centered Strategy
Designers often proceed upon a business requiements and focus on how to execute without clear understanding of why. When I joined the team, my first task was to step back from requirements and spend time on discovery. Thanks to my product manager and stakeholders for trusting the process, I was able to provide a strategic guidance that enhanced overall user experience.
Working along with researcher, data scientist and product manager, I created this UX Strategic Plan with key initiatives throughout the journey of home service pros. This design roadmap was well aligned with stakeholders from the very beginning, setting up the tone for how User Experience could take such an important part of product roll-out plan.
I created this Lean UX Persona based on the user study and data analytics so we could empathize on our targeted users with a basic understanding of their needs and pain points depending on their occupation, size of business and overall experience with Pro Referral.
In collaboration with a data analyst, I created this diagram to map the Lead Life Cycle, focusing on handyman leads in Texas—a high-demand category by occupation and region. The diagram tracks the lead journey, identifying where and why leads were ignored or passed. It also served as a baseline KPI for multiple Pro Referral projects.
I wanted to help pros grow with Pro Referral. Above is an affinity map I created during an ideation workshop with my product manager, engineers, and stakeholders for 'how might we help pros grow Pro Referral'. From there, we decided to prioritize Appointment Type as the phase 1 product feature to kick off.
Solution 1 - Appointment Type
Appointment Type allows pros to categorize their appointments based on purpose, making it easier to distinguish and manage multiple appointments per job. By selecting a specific type such as "Prepare a quote", "Perform Work", or "Follow-Up", pros stay organized, while the business gains better visibility into job progress, helping track lead status from New to Completed more effectively.
Goal
Empower users to schedule and browse appointments by specific type
Role
Provide short-term / long-term strategy, lead design sprint, deliver design solution
Timeline
1 week to complete and hand-off design solution / 2 weeks to build, test and deploy
Context: These screenshots show the old version of the Job Detail (far left), Appointment Edit (2nd from left), Job Page (3rd from left), and Appointment Page (far right).
Problem: We observed a significantly low engagement rate with the orange CTA for updating job status (far left), making it difficult to track whether a job was completed. Through user research, we discovered that pros didn’t see any benefit in updating job status via Pro Referral. They also felt the platform lacked sufficient useful content and features to manage their leads or track lead activity effectively.
This is the updated appointment tool with appointment types and the ability to create multiple appointments per job. The update increased retention by 20% and helped the business track lead status from New to Completed by offering value to users. For instance, scheduling an appointment for ‘Perform Work’ updates the job status to ‘Hired’.
Bonus: Adding the ‘Request Review’ CTA boosted the completion rate, helping pros receive customer reviews and marking the job status as ‘Completed’.
Ideally, appointment types seemed valuable by helping users identify the purpose of each appointment, but how could we validate their impact before fully committing?
Above are slides from a survey I launched with 2,000 respondents. The results showed that over 50% of pros typically schedule two or more appointments per job (left), making it essential to distinguish them by type. This insight also guided our decision on default appointment type options (right).
Solution 2 - Beast Mode
Beast Mode is the project code name for the Lead Progress Screen in Pro Referral, designed to help pros track their performance and improve engagement. It provides key insights, such as response time and completed work, creating awareness of how pros are performing. By highlighting these metrics, low-performing pros are encouraged to respond more promptly to leads, ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
Goal
Create self-awareness of pros' performance that can motivate them to do more and progress
Role
Define value proposition, lead design process including usability test, deliver design solution
Timeline
1 month to complete and handoff design solution / 1 month to build, test and deploy
This is a screenshot of a presentation slide I created outlining key problems. The old Performance page had low traffic and retention, offering little value to users. Meanwhile, we struggled with pros who had poor performance ratings.
Analyzing data by occupation, region, and timeframe, we found that 33% of pros ignored leads, resulting in poor customer experiences and harming their own reputation. Our design goal was to revamp this screen to improve feature discoverability and drive higher engagement by providing pros with valuable performance insights.
This is a shot of my rough sketch during brainstorm session. I had an early check-point by sharing these sketches to get feedback from the product team then moved on to a series of design iterations.
Moving on from the rough sketch, we explored with various versions of wireframe for different concepts. However, this particular version did not make the final cut. Although we had the capability of building a complex app with a lot of data visualization, knowing our users, their average app usage time, and familiarity of working with heavy data saturated UI, we figured that this was too overwhelming and not suitable for our targeted users.
Progress is the new name for the revamped Performance screen, featuring a complete overhaul with all-new functionality. It consists of two main components: My Data – Provides insights into how pros are performing, Checklist – Guides pros on optimizing their engagement.
From left to right, the mocks show how the experience varies for different user levels: new users with no leads (2nd from left), experienced users with 3 leads (second from right), and advanced users with 20 leads (far right) proving a range of performance insights, including average contact time, jobs completed, lead response rate, and reviews/ratings.
Hypothesis: By increasing self-awareness of performance, we believe pros will be self-motivated to improve their responsiveness and engagement.
The Progress-Checklist adapts to both new users with no leads and experienced users with lead history, guiding them with tips to grow their business through Pro Referral. It evaluates performance data in areas like average contact time, displaying either a green checkmark for good performance or an alert icon for areas needing improvement. The content strategy clearly communicates what their performance is, why it matters, and how to improve.
This is the complete interaction guideline for Beast Mode (also known as Progress), covering both mobile and web in a responsive design. By following a strategic plan, we defined the MVP, prioritized key components, and were able to make rapid progress.
