Sean Lee | Product Design Lead | San Mateo, CA
Pro Referral
Pro Referral is the marketplace platform connecting home service pros with consumers and Home Depot stores. Home Depot's pro network drives 40% of store profit, but pros were disengaged across the board -- ignoring leads, skipping status updates, and rarely returning to the app.
I led UX strategy and design to tackle this root problem through two focused solutions: Appointment Type, a job management tool that helps pros stay organized while giving the business visibility into lead status, and Beast Mode, a performance dashboard that creates self-awareness to motivate better engagement.
Discovery & Strategy
Before jumping into solutions, I stepped back to map the full pro journey end-to-end, partnering with a researcher, data scientist, support agents and PM to build a UX roadmap that aligned stakeholders on priorities and set the strategic foundation for every design decision that followed.
This lean UX Persona was created based on the user study and subject matter interviews with internal experts to build team empathy around how pros of different experience levels and business sizes interact 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 flow tracks the lead journey, identifying where and how leads were ignored or passed. It also served as a baseline KPI for multiple Pro Referral projects.
After mapping where and why pros were disengaged, I facilitated a cross-functional workshop with PMs, engineers, and stakeholders around the question: "how might we help pros grow their business with Pro Referral?" The session helped us align on two priorities -- improving job management to drive status visibility, and building self-awareness tools to encourage better lead response. These became Appointment Type and Beast Mode.
Solution 1: Appointment Type
Without accurate job status updates, Home Depot had no visibility into whether a lead was still open, completed, or abandoned -- making it impossible to manage the business effectively. But pushing pros to manually update status wasn't working because there was nothing in it for them.
Instead, I designed Appointment Type -- a job management tool that helps pros organize their work by appointment purpose, especially with 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
Increase lead status visibility by driving pro engagement through an organizational tool
Role
Provide UX strategy, lead design sprint, conduct a survey, and deliver final design solution
Timeline
1 week to complete and design solution and launch survey / 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: Analytics showed a significantly low engagement rate on the job status CTA (far left) because pros saw no benefit in updating it. A survey of 2,000 pros revealed that over 50% of them managed multiple appointments per job, with no way to distinguish them in the current experience.
The updated Appointment Type tool supports multiple appointment types per job, giving pros a structured way to manage their work while automatically updating lead status for the business. Scheduling a "Perform Work" appointment, for example, updates the job status to "Hired" -- no manual input required.
The result: 20% increase in pro retention and significantly improved lead status visibility.
By delivering something genuinely valuable to pros, lead status visibility becomes a natural byproduct, not burden.
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Bonus line: Adding the "Request Review" CTA gave pros an easy way to collect customer reviews while simultaneously marking the job as "Completed" -- closing the loop for both sides.
Solution 2: Beast Mode
When pros ignored leads or responded slowly, it created a poor customer experience that hurt trust, damaged the reputation of the Pro Referral platform. However, many pros were unaware that these behaviors were also negatively affecting their own performance and opportunities within the marketplace.
That’s why I designed Beast Mode, a lead progress experience that helps pros better understand their performance through insights such as response time and completed work. By creating visibility into how daily behaviors impact success on the platform, the experience encourages stronger engagement from pros while improving the overall 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 design and user research / 1 month to build, test and deploy in production
Through user research and data analysis, I discovered that the existing Performance page had low engagement and provided little actionable value to pros. Meanwhile, 33% of pros ignored leads, creating poor customer experiences and damaging both the Pro Referral platform and their own reputation in the marketplace.
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Our goal was to redesign the experience to create greater visibility into how daily behaviors such as response time and ignored leads directly impacted performance, engagement, and overall success on the platform.
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 initial sketches, I explored multiple wireframe concepts and interaction models. Although some directions introduced more advanced data visualization, concept testing revealed that the it was too overwhelming for our target users based on their average app usage patterns and familiarity with data-heavy interfaces.
As a result, we shifted toward a simpler and more focused experience that prioritized clarity, usability, and faster decision-making.
Progress is the new name for the revamped Performance screen, redesigned to give pros greater visibility into their engagement and overall performance on the platform. The experience consists of two main components: My Data, which surfaces performance insights, and Checklist, which guides pros toward stronger engagement behaviors.
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From left to right, the mocks show how the experience adapts across different user levels, from new users with no leads to experienced pros managing multiple active jobs. Depending on engagement, users receive insights such as response time, jobs completed, lead response rate, and customer ratings.
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By increasing awareness of how daily behaviors impact success on the platform, the experience motivates pros to become more proactive and engaged over time.
The Checklist adapts to both new users with no leads and experienced pros with lead history, providing personalized guidance to help grow their business through Pro Referral. Based on each pro’s performance data such as average contact time and response rate, the experience dynamically surfaces green checkmarks for strong performance or alert indicators for areas needing improvement.
The content strategy was designed to clearly communicate what their performance is, why it matters, and how to improve within the context of their own activity and engagement.
This interaction guideline outlines the complete Beast Mode experience (also known as Progress) across both mobile, tablet, and desktop.
By increasing awareness of how daily behaviors impacted success on the platform, Beast Mode helped drive stronger engagement from pros, contributing to a reduction in ignored leads, improved response rates, and significantly higher adoption compared to the previous Performance feature.
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For the complete Home Services Ecosystem, check out Store and Consumers experience.
