Giving home-service companies the control their work requires

Overview

Problem

From window cleaners to Christmas-light installers, every company priced, travelled and scheduled differently. The product treated them the same, and it stopped at the bid.

Solution

Bundles each company sets up its own way, asked for in my interviews and still core to ResponsiBid years later. Then service areas drawn on a map, and the first version of jobs.

Bundles that lasted
Tested service areas
Jobs from bids

Role

UX Designer and the only designer, part-time while studying full-time. Research, prototypes, usability testing and developer documentation, working one-on-one with our product manager.

Shipped

Bundles: no more discounts at the door

Technicians used to make up discounts at the door and write them onto the bid by hand. I built bundles from the pricing worksheets companies already used and tested them with users. Bundles touched three people:

Owners set bundles up once, with a discount in dollars or percent.
Sales reps offer Good / Better / Best bundles on the bid.
Homeowners see the savings in their proposal, online and printed.

Fig. 01: Good / Better / Best on the sales rep’s bid, and in the homeowner’s proposal

Decision

Every option, without the confusion

Every company wanted different controls. My rule: show only what the next decision needs, so a service’s settings open only once it’s picked. Then the edge cases:

A flat bundle price, so services lose their own prices.
A service with no price yet.
Locking the package inside a bundle.
One service in several bundles, counted once on the printed proposal.

Fig. 02: The owner’s setup, with each service closed until it’s needed

Research

Service areas: owners don’t think in circles

I interviewed owners and office managers one-on-one, many of them former technicians. My first version drew a radius around each office, in miles or minutes. But owners didn’t think in circles. One had a paper map on the office wall that drivers planned their days from.

So owners draw the area they already know and give it a rule: a price change, “Bid in Person” or “Out of Area.” A simulation tests any address first. I tested it with written tasks. It was finished, then deprioritized before it was built.

Fig. 03: Areas drawn on a map, each with its own rule

Foundation

Jobs: from a bid to the work itself

ResponsiBid began as a plug-in that handed won bids to tools like Jobber. With our product manager, I designed the first version of jobs:

Defined what a job is in an event-storming session, then cut it to the smallest useful release.
Split follow-up, because bids are estimates and jobs are work.
Flexible visits across several days and technicians. Seven versions, tested.
Line items that carry the bid’s services, bundles included, onto the work order.
Documented ticket by ticket. I left in January 2024, before it shipped.

Fig. 04: The job page, with services carried over from the bid, bundle discount included

What I learned

Early in my career, I learned the most from the people I interviewed and tested with. I also learned to stop handing developers finished, pixel-perfect files. Working through the solution with them sooner would have saved time, and that’s how I’ve worked since.

Reflection

When a real customer needs three ways to do something, I’ll fight for all three. When control is added just in case, it makes the product harder for everyone.

My original designs from 2021–2024, shown with ResponsiBid’s permission. All data in them is made up.