Hayward Lumber Needfinding
In short
Helping Hayward support the needs of door professionals.
Inspo
Needfinding course at Stanford
Skills
User Research
Needfinding
Experience Design
Date
4 weeks during fall 2022
Helping Hayward support the needs of door professionals.
Needfinding course at Stanford
User Research
Needfinding
Experience Design
4 weeks during fall 2022
Hayward Lumber is a lumber yard that supplies a selection of wood, framing materials, hardware, tools, doors & windows. Their mission is to be the most dependable supplier of products, services and solutions to the construction market.
To support this mission, my Needfinding class at Stanford partnered with them to facilitate their understanding of stakeholders in the homebuilding process.
Hayward Lumber sells directly to general contractors. And yet, Hayward has a relatively limited understanding of the tradespeople that those contractors depend on.
My team chose to examine the unmet needs of door professionals because of the importance, prevalence, and variety of doors in everyday life and particularly in home building. Hayward works directly with door professionals at both the seller and distributor levels. Thus, door professionals have needs that Hayward can address.
We conducted a rigorous research process to dig deep into the issues that door professionals face. Then, based on our insights, we designed three solutions to address their unmet needs.
Watching the actions of door professionals, interviewing them to dig deeper into their thought processes and experiences, participating in their daily activities with them, and researching the door industry at large. This is all to build empathy with door professionals, which is important to help see them and their industry in a new way. In this step, we developed a key finding that informed the direction of the project.
Synthesizing our data by reflecting on our observations, brainstorming, noticing patterns, determining their underlying causes, and organizing information into frameworks. Essentially, we were asking why our finding was happening. In doing this, we determined an insight that stemmed from our finding. With this insight, we identified door professionals' underlying needs.
Deciding how to act upon the insights and needs – determining approaches for the design of a solution. In this process, we defined design principles and criteria to guide our solutions.
Then, we designed concrete solutions – for Hayward to implement – to door professionals' underlying needs. We were encouraged to 1. go beyond functional benefits to consider the social and emotional needs of the people we met, and 2. not be afraid to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
We began by seeking out professionals in the door industry, both at the seller and distributor level. We conducted interviews both in person and on Zoom with professionals at Hayward Lumber, Home Depot, Belmont Pioneer, TruStile, Jeld-Wen, PlastPro, and TrimLite to broaden our understanding of the field and gather as much information and as many perspectives as possible. that could lead us to develop findings.
Through our extensive observations and conversations, a theme emerged. We noticed that every door professional that we talked to seemed intent on making sure we understood the complexity of their work, often with the assumption that we underestimated them. This led us to our finding:
When talking about the door industry, door professionals try to convince people that it’s “much more complicated than it seems” and that “doors are more than just a rectangle.”
This activity of persuading others that the door industry is more nuanced than it may appear suggests that there’s a perception, at least on the surface, that it isn’t. We even heard this directly from the president of Jeld-Wen Canada, a major window and door distributor, that “when coming into the door industry, I just figured I was gonna have to dumb myself down a little bit to run this business… I thought it would be a cakewalk.”
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Observing this pattern of defensiveness across several people, we asked ourselves why this might be the case. We wondered: why would veterans of an industry, who know its complexities, feel the need to prove anything to outsiders? This led us to the following insight:
Door professionals defend the door industry to make people care about it. This disrupts people’s desensitization toward doors, therefore making door professionals feel less overlooked.
Despite being well-established in the world of doors, door industry professionals understand that not everyone thinks much about doors or understands the intricacy of their design, construction, and implementation. Furthermore, they understand that to persuade a customer to invest in a door, they need to make sure they understand this complexity. A Vice President at TrimLite, a major door manufacturer, told us that when door professionals make customers aware of this complexity, they're more likely to customize their doors, making “average order values go up 8 to 10%”.
Defending the door industry isn’t just about sales. It’s also a way for door industry professionals to shine light on their own role and contributions, lessening their feelings of being overlooked. Analyzing this insight reveals a deeper set of needs:
#1: A need to prove that their work is valuable
#2: A need to communicate the impact that doors can have on homes, and by extension, a need to communicate the impact that door industry professionals have on the homebuilding process
#3: A need to address others’ misconceptions about the industry
Below is a further breakdown of these needs:
To solve for these needs, we developed three design principles. Then, according to these principles, we ideated and prototyped corresponding solutions.
Build a digital or physical visual tool for door professionals to understand the scale of their achievements.
Recognizing that door professionals needed a better way to feel like they have an impact, we created DoorMaps: sleek maps that door professionals can fill over time with stickers representing each of their successful sales. We chose to make this a physical paper map (rather than digital) because of the tactile satisfaction of a map and the ease of use in an office space.
Imagine how rewarding it would be to fill the map with your successes! And that’s not all - door professionals can scan each sticker for a reminder of the details of a particular sale.
The larger map of California serves larger-scale doors suppliers, and the regional map serves local salespeople. Both versions make the impact of door professionals' work more tangible. Perhaps monthly, Hayward can provide stickers to their suppliers, and managers can distribute them to their salespeople as well.
Create a positive reinforcement communication system that lets door professionals frequently receive feedback, so they feel proud about their work.
Doorsticks are stickers placed on sold doors which provides a quick way for customers to thank their door professional and give feedback. The sticker serves as a reminder to customers of who helped them, offers an easy way for them to extend their appreciation, and adds a human element to the door experience. This dignifies the door professional's work, making it more likely that they receive the positive feedback that they deserve and need to feel validated.
Develop an interactive customer experience that raises curiosity about the door industry among customers and aids door professionals in communicating the complexity of the industry and doors themselves.
DoorExplorer is a tool that allows customers to play around with creating their own door in a gamified manner. Through DoorExplorer, customers are able to fully envision what their future door could look like in their own home, discover customizations, and compare the wide variety of door models and products. The tool also displays educational fun facts about doors and the industry to help deepen customers' understanding of doors and the industry at large.
Making this door design and exploration process easily accessible to the customer will help them see how special doors can be. And encouraging more customer involvement in the design process, as we’ve been learned from our interviews, increases the dollar amount of an average purchase by 8-10%!
This was a challenging but highly rewarding project.
This needfinding process was centered around navigating ambiguity. For example, there were moments when we didn't know what to do with the information we'd gathered, we were oscillating between observation and interpretation, and we weren't sure how to put our thoughts into words. By working through this ambiguity and the associated frustration, I developed a proficiency in the needfinding process that makes me a more intentional and thoughtful designer.
I also gained a lot of practice gathering abstract concepts and phrasing them concisely. Storytelling is immensely important through this needfinding process!
During this project, I felt like I was in the door professionals' shoes. The many hours I invested in this project and the taxing nature of thinking through ambiguous problems and questions made me feel like I was entrenched in the world of the door industry. Thus, uncovering the needs of this unfamiliar user group made me develop genuine empathy for them.
The theories and methods I learned through this project give me the confidence to tackle any new problem space with empathy and intentionality.
