Hire A Pro: Building a 0 to 1 home services marketplace
Nextdoor · Q3–Q4 2021 // product design · mobile + web
There are over 10 million quarterly inquiries for home services on Nextdoor and 1 million service providers on Nextdoor with a claimed business page. We saw tremendous potential in how we might bridge the gap between neighbors asking for services and the local services providers who are able to meet their needs. Thus, the concept of an instant booking product, "Hire A Pro”, was born.
Core Team
Lead product designer, researcher, content strategist, product manager, 2 engineering managers, 10+ engineers
Responsibilities
End-to-end design
We aimed to connect and facilitate seamless interactions between neighbors and local service providers. For the neighbors, we wanted to streamline their process of finding and hiring local pros, and for the local pros, we wanted to help them grow a successful business.
Principles
Service providers must be verified to participate
Trust and safety is top of mind
Optimize for sole proprietors
Bring your own tool vs end-to-end solution
We designed and built an online services marketplace connecting neighbors to local home service providers through a chat and booking experience on Nextdoor. Our MVP solution launched to the Bay Area and exceeded our transaction goal by 33%. Meanwhile, we kept close to the data and customer feedback to improve the experience. We also continued to design and build our next version.
Challenges
For MVP, we were not only limited in product marketing efforts, but fully integrating this product into the full IA of the Nextdoor app. So we had to be thoughtful in how users would discover this product, while still designing a cohesive experience with the rest of the app.
Approach
Our approach was to surface Hire A Pro in context and when relevant. A user who searches for a local pro on Nextdoor will find businesses that are participating in Hire A Pro at the top of the search results and see helpful information highlighted about them. When they view a participating local pro's business page, they'll find a request quote module, which provides them with a clear step forward to connecting with this pro and hiring them for the job.
Search results with pros ranked highest
Business page of local pro
Challenges
From user interviews, we knew that home service pros are incredibly busy, managing their business while also being the one to perform the services and everything that surrounds a home service job, from scheduling, assessing, and showing up for the on-site. Logically, we could design a solution that automates all of this for them to save time. However, one common sentiment all our users shared was that getting to know their customers was one of the keystones of their business and they didn't want to lose that connection. So we had to find the right balance of being helpful while still empowering pros to show up in their own unique ways.
Approach
We leaned into the chat feature as the homebase for everything related to the job. From an IA perspective, this helped to contain the scope of our MVP. It also aligned with our principle of focusing on the connection by letting the neighbor and local pro communicate while still providing relevant and helpful information through the quote request and the booking card.
Chat serves as the hub for the job
Challenges
A critical part of the experience we wanted to address was the transition from online to offline interactions between the neighbor and the local pro.
Approach
Upholding our principle of trust and safety, I organized and led a brainstorm to expose ways a bad actor could hack the experience so that we could counter-design for it. As a result of the brainstorm, we designed a verification step utilizing unique job codes. This instills confidence in both parties and establishes a clear record of job start and time for potential dispute resolution.
Unique code required to to start the job
