Who is My HomeSphere for?
HomeSphere has over 2,600 home building companies on their program. These builders didn’t have a digital tool to manage their HomeSphere rebate program.
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What’s My HomeSphere?
My HomeSphere is an application that helps home builders manage their HomeSphere rebate program, track and maximize their rebate opportunities for their ongoing building projects. The app now is available for over 2,600 home builders nationwide.
Why Design it?
HomeSphere had 1,500 builders on their program when I first started as their digital marketing specialist. These builders didn’t have access to a modern tool that allowed them to manage a robust rebate program internally.
These builders needed a tool that would simplify the process for them. HomeSphere also had needs to create a tool that could free up some of the administrative time for the nationwide team of market specialists so they could focus on new business opportunities.
The application had to incorporate a functional solution that provided value to the home builders company and to HomeSphere regarding business goals.
Builders needed to know who their regional market specialist was and have an easy way to upload documents for rebates. They also needed a way to know how much they were getting in rebates, when they’d receive payment and the ability to track their earnings year over year.
The company now has over 2,600 home building companies using the application today and it was awarded Constructech Top Product 2018.
How Was it Designed?
User Research
Before My HomeSphere was redesigned there was an initial version that allowed us to receive quantitative data and qualitative feedback from a user group of over 1,500 home building companies and their users.
Feedback from interviews and data helped us understand what the needs were for My HomeSphere users and their businesses. In reviewing hard data we realized that most visited page on the company website was a page showcasing all of the brands available for rebates. This helped us design an addition of the new brand catalog to give builders easy access to adding new rebate eligible brands to their own building plans.
Marketing and Validating Demand and Usability
This video was used to market the product and get early buy in from varying customers, both current and prospective. This video is unique to the process because I took a hands on leadership approach to this project. My work on it consisted of filming, directing, animating, producing music and narrating this project. Creating it served as a tool to validate the demand of certain features by selling futures. It helped us to gain early feedback so we could understand what features they thought were most important to them.
The prototypes seen in the video were designed and used with our key audience at the International Builders Show in Orlando in 2018. This gave us a way to do further user research, usability tests and and also sell the future to new customers increasing our builder base by over 73% to a whopping 2,600 builders from 1,500.
Home Building Companies using My HomeSphere
%
Increase of New Org Users
%
MAU Increase YOY
Wire-Framing and Prototyping
I took the approach of redesigning the old style of the design to meet the updated style of the sister application HomeSphere-IQ. This allowed us to cut down on restyling for another application. We maintained a cohesive feel that fit the brand and updated look, feel and navigation style.
This allowed us to bring in a new sidebar navigation that used some original iconography. We moved away from a completely horizontal navigation giving the user more workspace when in the application.
Iconography
The design of all the icons was intended to give the product a home construction centric look and feel. We wanted to incorporate this personality even in the smallest details of the application. This also allowed me to give the tool a cohesive look and feel that was unique to HomeSphere’s brand and the product itself.
I’ve provided examples of the icons that were designed for the application. These icons were used to provide simple collapsed navigation and be heuristic for any non-labeled sections found within the application.
Branding the product
The product needed branding that felt cohesive to the overall company brand, and conveyed a sense of value to the customer. This was the fastest marketing approval we’d ever had for branding of any product.
The name was already defined and we wanted to give it a personal touch that conveyed an idea of ownership over the tool. I used a handwritten font treatment that gave the logo a signature look.
See More of My Work
Featured Project
HomeSphere-IQ
Awarded Constructech Top Product of 2019. This innovative app helps manufacturers find new builder business and tracks product usage of their current customers.
Featured Project
HomeSphere Hub
A solution designed to help the HomeSphere customer success teams offer greater customer service to users of the My HomeSphere and HomeSphere-IQ applications