Slab Fabricator

A website for ordering kitchen countertops online, on both web and mobile platforms. The early-stage process of the Order Process feature.

RESEARCH

INSPIRATION

For any project I work on, I start with inspiration. This is the fastest way to dive into the industry the project belongs to, so I dedicate time to this important part of the process. My research let me explore the variety of slab-fabrication companies and their products to find the best way for our project to proceed. I found out that the majority of slab fabricator companies have a variety of products, but I couldn't find the one that let me cut the exact amount of slab for my kitchen size. Therefore, our product's main value proposition would be a custom square footage calculation of the surface.

Greatlakesgm.com, has a wonderful visualization tool! A user can actually preview any material on the surface. Both the web and mobile platforms worked well. The weakness here is that they only offer a single kitchen floor plan as a template.

Stonetrash.com offered custom stone planes by pieces. A user can order pieces by custom size and add as many pieces as they want. The weakness, however, is its bad responsiveness of the mobile platform. Overall, the idea of custom measurement is great!

The main problem for the majority of them is that the mobile solutions look messy.

INTERVIEWS

Even though I didn't start this project from the beginning, I never missed a chance to do user interviews. What looks good to me may not look good for a potential user, so I always try to get a second opinion. For the Order Process feature, I talked to three friends of mine who have their own houses. One of them remodeled their kitchen, another one replaced the countertop. They shared with me their painful and joyful moments. This is what I found out:

• Home Depot is the best company in terms of quality and service. But none of my friends used Home Depot's website to make orders. They made phone calls or they talked to assistants in a store. In response to the question "why not?" they said, "The website is too complicated."

• A friend who only replaced the countertops liked an idea of a digital product that specializes primarily in countertops.

• An overabundance of information is exhausting! Simpler is better, but that's not well understood in the industry. The company wants to offer more, but in practice, they only confuse consumers.

• Changing your kitchen is painful, especially if you're trying to save money. The fact that you get a huge unexpected total cost is devastating. By the end, you just give up and become ready to pay more money for the experience to be over.

• There was too much communication involved. Two of my friends aren't native speakers, so it wasn't comfortable for them to be constantly on the phone discussing their kitchens.

OUTCOMES:

The main goal for our product is to eliminate the number of steps a user takes when ordering the product, decrease the level of confusion, and minimize communication. In other words, we set out to make the process less stressful by providing a clear and distinct design.

ORDER PROCESS: FIVE STEPS

Step 1. The user can select the Color of the countertop. The search can be filtered by distributors, color family, thickness, finish type, and price. The user can also see the details of the product by hovering over it.

Step 2. The user can select Finish and Thickness.

Step 3. The user can select a kitchen shape. They can see their progress at the top of the screen in web, and by clicking on the bar menu in mobile.

Step 4. At this step, our first solution was to present a schematic representation of the slab edge (Option A) for consistency. But after deeper research, our team transitioned to Option B with photos in the background. A rapid user test proved that this was a better solution.

Step 5. The user can drag the circles on the scheme to change the size of the kitchen. They can also enter the measurements on the left side of the screen. The user can also indicate what side of the kitchen is located next to the wall and whether backsplash tile is needed for it. In addition, the user can select the number of sinks and other cutouts.

P.S. OUR OTHER DELIVERABLES

Onboarding