Problem
At the time of inception, store associates spent an average of 6 minutes to create a contract for renting tools from The Home Depot. By this metric alone, there existed pains on behalf of the associate, the customer, and the business (in terms of labor hours spent per hour). This problem was accentuated during the warmer weekends of the year, where a customer could wait as long as an hour before learning that the tool in which they wanted to rent was no longer available, or that they were being charged extra for returning it after the time it was due.
Process
By collaborating with the balanced product team (consisting of fellow UX designers, lead engineers, and product managers), we spent weeks interviewing associates and stakeholders to understand the pain points from user and stakeholder perspectives. We plotted our course ahead by juxtaposing business value and user pain, prioritizing solutions that were technically feasible and iterative in design. Along with my fellow designers, we continued to research feature sets with end-users, and created bi-weekly reports to stakeholders about new findings. We performed user-tests with low and high-fidelity mockups and prototypes (using Sketch/Invision and Axure) and collaborated with engineers on the team for front-end development accuracy. Occasionally, pivots in strategy would cause us to reevaluate priorities, and there were several findings that informed business needs and prompted us all to realign.
Solution
As of today, the final product is live in production and has cut the tool rental transaction time down to under 2 minutes (happy path) and accounts for the majority of edge cases that we found that could marginally increase that time. The success of the product allowed users to spend less time with transactions and spend more time qualifying customers in the tool rental space to make sure they are making the right purchase for their needs. As such, labor costs were reallocated to customer service, as opposed to system management. Creating this new platform with the future in mind allows the current product team to continue to iterate on features, and explore new areas of opportunity, without having to recreate the system from scratch or rely on third party software. The product was considered a success and was acknowledged within our company IT awards for the 2017 fiscal year.
