Project context
This is a case study on using foundational UX research to inform an AI-native product strategy. The goal: to help users feel seen, supported, and confident at every step of their journey from recognizing an issue to hiring the right professional.
Challenge
The challenge: address user pain points associated with form-based home service requests. Homeowners often struggle to articulate their problems, leading to anxiety, procrastination, and project abandonment.
Solution
To solve this, qualitative research should be conducted to develop three detailed personas and their corresponding journey maps. These artifacts serve as a roadmap for the product team, providing a shared understanding of users' diverse needs. The journey maps visualizes the end-to-end experience, pinpointing specific moments of friction and highlighting opportunities for AI intervention.
Impact
This research provides the content design strategy for AI features like:
Multimodal input (voice and photo) for expressing problems.
AI-guided conversations that clarify user intent.
Agentic workflows that streamline matching and communication with professionals. (Agentic AI systems are designed to act autonomously, perceive their environment, reason about it, and take action to achieve goals without constant human intervention. Focuses on taking actions and completing tasks. Continuously adapting, vs. generative AI, which focuses on input prompts to generate new content and does not initiate tasks or make decisions independently.)
This will help the team design a more confident and effortless user experience, crucial for retention and growth.
UX research: Personas and journeymap for Thumbtack
I created a project exploring hypothetical user experiences and a journey map for Thumbtack, the go-to platform for homeowners and service professionals. Generally, extensive user research should be conducted before developing personas. But this project was created to showcase my UX research, content design, and generative-AI skills.
Thumbtack’s current homeowner flow for hiring a pro.
User personas
Sample user journey
How might we build better experiences that reduce uncertainty, clarify intent, and unlock forward momentum for homeowners and pros?
This user journey describes Olivia's experience using an AI-powered version of Thumbtack to fix a leaky kitchen sink and more support from content design guidelines. The process is broken down into 5 phases, from the moment she discovers the problem to leaving a review. (Currently, Thumbtack breaks this journey into 5 unique phases common to every project type.)
The journey highlights how AI and multimodal input (like taking a photo) could transform a stressful situation into a seamless one. This AI-driven process removes common pain points, like miscommunication and overwhelming options, leading to a more confident hiring decision and a positive experience. The content designer's role is crucial in making this process feel intuitive and trustworthy to the user.