Angie's List
Grounded by insights and feedback from homeowners interviews and collaborative sessions, we synthesized our findings into two distinct user journeys. Each journey was documented as a journey map to visualize our findings alongside relevant stages of the home project process.
Our two user types: active seekers and referral receives shared a desire to find the right provider for their project needs, but varied in their approach. Active seekers were proactive in prospect pros for estimates, carefully evaluating their services and work experience before hiring. While referral receivers entrusted their personal network for reference and decision making.
Connecting homeowners with the right pro for a project is the bread and butter for Angie’s List. Since the company’s launch in 1999, this has primarily been facilitated through a directory of local service providers paired user-submitted ratings and reviews. Our design explorations acknowledged that many still preferred this model of pro discovery and evaluation (active seekers), but that new users were increasingly looking to the product to help cut through the noise and make hiring recommendations.
A “match” feature was designed to help these homeowners quickly and easily find the best local pros with relevant services and request a quote. To facilitate the right match, users first answered a few targeted, category-based questions about their project before receiving a curated list of local providers. With this list, users could further evaluate these recommended pros with profile previews designed to highlight to answer the most common homeowner questions when considering who to hire.
Beyond matching a homeowner with the best local pro, our team thought a lot about how we could build a foundational framework for homeowners and their hired pros to better collaborate. We had learned from our research that homeowners often felt that they lacked clear visibility into their project status and wanted a reliable method to manage their projects. We prototyped an active project interface that responded dynamically to each step of the project process, but struggled with how to build right states and corresponding triggers given the vast difference in scale and complexity of common homeowner projects — a kitchen remodel is significantly different than a one-time carpet cleaning.
The final shipped project management interface was simplified to focus on the hired pro, project quote, space for drafting notes, and in-app messaging. This framework gives the app a base to build and improve on, with features like rich messaging objects and progressive review capture.
The redesigned Angie’s List native mobile app launched in late 2019 and drove a significant increase in downloads and user engagement. User satisfaction was also improved, highlighted by an Apple App Store rating increase from less than 2 stars to rating high of 4.4 out of 5.
In 2021, ANGI Homeservices, the parent company of Angie’s List and Home Advisor, announced a repositioning and rebranding for their core business: Angie’s List became ‘Angi’ and the Home Advisor brand was updated as “Powered by Angi." ◼︎
