Creating effortless and beautiful moodboards with custom product recommendations.
ROLE
Product Designer
Team
1 Product Manager
6 Engineers
Project type
Mobile (iOS and Android)
Year
2022
Context
Pottery Barn Wants to Provide a Way for Customers to Collect Inspiration
Pottery Barn understands that busy moms and dads have little time in their daily lives to shop and browse through endless catalogs and websites. However, these parents still want to set up a space that they and their children would adore. Pottery Barn Kids and Teen wanted to develop a product that enables on-the-go parents and kids to gather and share design ideas for their new rooms in a hassle-free manner.
Problem
Moodboarding Tools are Designed for Desktop Use
Pottery Barn Kids and Teen's clientele mainly shopped and communicated on mobile devices, yet there was no accessible tool on mobile that enabled them to find inspiration and design their bedroom spaces.
Solution
Jumpstart design with predesigned templates
Customized recommendations based on machine learning algorithms from customer selections
Easy path from add to cart to purchase
Design Process
Goals
Business Needs
Pottery Barn Kids and Teen wants to offer their customers a means of translating their ideas into tangible purchases.
Product Goals
The goal of the new application would be to develop a platform that allows customers to swiftly visualize products, assemble their imaginative concepts, and seamlessly share them with others on their mobile devices.
Research
Demographics
Female
35–45 median age
Tech savvy
DIY designers
Competitors
Canva
Morpholio
Research Insights
User experience researchers from Williams-Sonoma conducted interviews and focus groups to gather insights on how customers start their room planning and the features they liked and disliked on other moodboarding apps. I then distilled their research to three main insights that I can take actionable steps in the design.
Insight 1:
75% of Users Start their Design Process with Moodboarding
Insight 2:
85% Want to Know the Spatial Dimensions of Products
Insight 3:
Users Want to See Products Tailored to their Needs
Opportunity
How Might We...
How might we provide a way for users to quickly visualize products and communicate their vision before starting floor planning?
Concepts
I Like, I Wish, What If
Moodboard features brainstorm:
Freeform
Add to cart
Add products, photos, text
Share board
Design chat
Portfolio of all created boards
Auto save
Feature Prioritization Matrix
With the list of features defined, we then organized it into a diagram that helped prioritize them by visualizing each feature's value and effort.
Wireframes
Iterations
Iteration 1: Left to right - Board canvas, Categories panel, and Product search
Iteration 2: Left to right - Tutorial, Portfolio, Board canvas, and Drag item to board
Defining MVP Features
At this point, all project stakeholders recognized that to meet the planned launch date for the application, it was necessary to prioritize specific features for the minimum viable product (MVP) and delay others for subsequent versions.
MVP:
Templates—needed by the ML for recommendations
Add to cart
Share board
Design chat
Recommendations only—reducing choice overload
Post MVP:
Annotation tools
Search
Filters
Categories
Upload images
Iteration 3
Left to right: Room type modal, Room style modal, Recommendations panel, and Product info panel
The Smart Moodboard jumpstarts the user's design process by providing templates customized to their preferred room type and decor style, inspiring their design from the beginning.
Custom Suggestions
By utilizing the information on the user's preferred room type and desired decor style, we offer personalized product suggestions, which helps to alleviate cognitive overload and enables the user to make informed and confident selections.
Make Purchasing Easy
We provide an easy way for customers to go from moodboarding to buying the items that they like. By offering users a seamless transition from the design process to purchasing not only benefits the user, but also the business.
Impact
Outcomes
We successfully launched the Smart Moodboard to the Pottery Barn Kids and Teen iOS app in November 2022.
Next Steps
Expand to tablet and desktop
Add additional features like annotations and image uploads
