Contractor Pro

ContractorPro is an administrative and project management app for small business owners. The company’s objective is to enhance user satisfaction by implementing new design features aimed at saving time and reducing the onboarding learning curve for new users.

Background

Being a contractor means much more than just providing a service - it means wearing the  multiple hats of a small business owner. From managing client relationships to handling marketing and administrative tasks, contractors invest an immense amount of time and effort into running and growing their business. This can create difficulty between a work life balance. This is where ContractorPro comes in to help bear the load of contractors administrative and project management tasks.

“I’ve been saying I need a secretary as long as I’ve been doing contracting work.” - Gene, Primary User

The Problem

The founder of ContractorPro, Gene Iserman, represents the primary user group as a contractor turned business owner contractor. Gene found that administrative tasks such as invoicing, billing, contract negotiations, and managing project scheduling to be time-consuming responsibilities that take away from billable work hours. Contractor Pro, is currently in production and aims to bring organization and streamlined administrative processes to small businesses. Contractor Pro endeavors to liberate owners' time and alleviate mental strain by proficiently organizing tasks and projects, ultimately enabling owners to handle more jobs and expand their businesses.

Given significant developer time constraints - how might we reduce the time to learn and understand the app, as well as, create new features that improve the efficiency of  project management tasks? 

The ProCess

Understanding the Competition  

To start, our team conducted a competitive audit on leading contractor apps in the market. After dividing individual site audits, we compiled a list of commonly used features, notable UI, and special offerings. I found the main difference of competitors’ software was that it is built out for employees, versus contractors, which changes their subscription pricing structure and leads to different user needs. ContractorPro is focused on simple, action oriented steps that take away the decision making fatigue found in competitors offerings. What I found to be the most notable feature difference with ContractorPro is their beta stage broadcasting board. The broadcasting board allows efficient and quality job assignment, optional job bids, and quickly filled job placement, which all entice contractor networks to be built within ContractorPro’s app.

Deep Dive into the User Experience

The three different user groups of ContractorPro:

1. Owner - the primary user of the app. They own small contracting businesses. 

2. Contractor - contractors or subcontractors that work for owners

3. Customer is the Owners customer looking for work to be done

My focus for this project was the primary user group - small business owners. To gain deeper insight into the owner experience while using the app, I created a journey map to navigate through key touch points along the users ‘happy path’. The journey map will also serve as a strong visual of the impact in the user experience before and after my suggested new features.

After conducting a stakeholder interview, it was clear the web app is in the very initial stages of development, and we would have to work within time budget and developer constraints in order to come up with the best recommendations for the next steps in their development process. Before the upcoming tech scoping interviewing, I designed 7 rapid lo-fi feature cards of my initial new feature ideas to present to the developer.

Key FINDINGS

Journey Map

The initial user journey map found the most significant pain points to be - assigning jobs, handling payments payments, and tracking a users schedule. The remaining pain points had moderate ratings, and include customer notifications, estimates, job board organization, and customer communication.

Tech Scoping

My 7 feature cards were created to address the main pain points found in my user journey map. However, after consulting with the develop at ContractorPro, it was clear some of my ideas would be far out of the 16 point budget/40hr work week. Unfortunately, ContractorPro is unable to receive payments or receive text notifications for customer requests without a heavy lift, which was beyond the scope of the current constraints. Kevin, the developer, found my remaining 4 features cards of auto-replies, creating estimate PDFs, updating the broadcasting board, and adding a new bidding board to be easy to moderate lifts. Both Kevin and Gene, the owner, were most interested in the Bid Broadcasting Board Feature card.

Kano Analysis

Nine out of the 42 feature cards were presented to ContractorPro’s primary user group - 9 participants. To our surprise, the biding board feature preferred by Gene and Kevin was found by the participants to be in the indifferent category of the analysis, meaning users don’t really care whether the feature exists or not. This is likely due to the fact that tested participants already have extensive contractor networks and rarely need to bid jobs, which may not be true as the app grows. The most promising features from this analysis proved to be a Calendar feature - with strong ratings in performance and impact. With other features remaining attractive like adding a workers profile, and text notifications.

The recommendation

After reviewing mixed research findings, I concluded that providing a blend of recommendations within the 16-point development budget would be most beneficial for ContractorPro. Upon reviewing the Kano Analysis, it became evident that the most valuable new feature to offer would be the implementation of a calendar into the web app.Considering the primary users' main goal of having a secretary as the primary function of this app, integrating a calendar seems essential and highly desirable for the user group. Despite the calendar consuming 13 of the 16 points, I deemed it to be valuable enough to justify the cost.

I decided to create the calendar as an iOS wireframe since the company aims to prioritize a mobile-first website. Presenting this feature as a mobile wireframe seemed most beneficial because visualizing its implementation on mobile devices is more challenging than on desktop. I aimed to provide as much support as possible in this process to facilitate the future development of this web app.

Developer Insights & Constraints

Currently, there is only one developer working on ContractorPro: Kevin Langmade. In a tech scoping meeting, Kevin walked us through the backend process and time constraints for each new feature idea, giving ratings based on the Fibonacci scale. The dev budget was limited to one sprint, which equated to 16 points. In total, our cohort presented 42 new feature ideas, and after the tech scoping meeting we conducted a dot vote to decide which features we would want to test through further research in a Kano Analysis. Nine features were selected to be tested on nine primary users and the results were surprising and informative.

With only 3 development points remaining, I prioritized 1-point features that would address significant user pain points identified in the journey map. These included customer request notifications, uploading estimates, and the broadcast board. Implementing these minor adjustments would greatly enhance the user flow and overall journey map experience.

I continued to present the new features in iOS wireframe format to align with the ultimate goal of a mobile-first web app, except for the 'Customer Request' wireframe. I opted to maintain this wireframe in desktop form for immediate implementation by the company, as it is a critical feature for alerting owners to new customer requests.

The Four Recommendations

With these four changes in place, ContractorPro will see significant improvements in the owner's journey map user flow, along with the addition of the most sought-after feature from research data: the calendar.

Small business owners using ContractorPro will finally have a built-in secretary at their fingertips.

Summary & next steps

The recommendations listed above represent a combination of initiating best practices and integrating user desires into new features within a 16 point sprint constraint. Based on user research from the Kano Analysis, the next steps would involve adding a worker profile and rating system to organize and prioritize listed contractors. Additionally, I would encourage ContractorPro to enhance communication channels between customers, contractors, and business owners. As this website evolves to function more like an app, it will be crucial to implement text notifications to streamline all internal communications. Incorporating these features, backed by data-driven insights and UX best practices, will deliver a streamlined, user-friendly solution that empowers busy business owners and contractors alike, saving them valuable time and enhancing productivity effortlessly.