Quote Tool

Company: MyBuilder (IAC)

Role: Design Director

Scope: Product Design · Strategy · UX Research · Team Leadership

The Problem

Homeowners posting jobs on MyBuilder were unsure which tradesperson to choose - they wanted quotes that gave them a realistic idea of the effort and costs involved. Tradespeople want to quote accurately but the process of writing a good quote is lengthy and once quoted it becomes binding, so the stakes for mistakes are high.

The Goal

To help tradespeople write detailed quotes they can stand behind, in a fraction of the time, on-site, on their phones. Send those quotes to homeowners to compare and allow MyBuilder to offer an insurance policy based on the detail in the quote.

The process

We explored the concept of a self-service “Quote Tool” that could offer easy to populate templates, based on thousands of historic quotes across the UK. Working closely with a product manager and developer, I led a small design team through:

• Industry expert interviews and behavioral research to validate assumptions

• Rapid prototyping user journeys to validate concepts

• Defining data-driven core job quote templates and simple population controls

• Designing lightweight UI that surfaced just enough context without complexity

• Iterating through user testing to refine tool comprehension and quote detail usability

We kept the focus on time to complete tasks, reducing complexity, and convenience to ensure easy comprehension for a typical less tech-savy audience. We were competing with pencil & paper, so the challenges to overcome were very real.

The Outcome

The Quote Tool became one of MyBuilder’s most adopted tools, enabling tradespeople to save hours of time, or achieve something they typically would not do, whilst giving homeowners clarity over their jobs and confidence in its successful completion. 

We saw a measurable lift in trust indicators between tradespeople and homeowners, as well as with the platform.

More importantly, we helped close the gap between user uncertainty and confident action—making a traditionally stressful part of the home improvement process feel more transparent and guided.

My Contribution

• Defined product strategy alongside PM and engineering

• Led user research and testing

• Directed UX/UI design and data integration

• Presented findings and rationale to senior leadership at IAC

• Drove the product to MVP launch and subsequent iterations

Project success

The Quote Tool has been highly successful, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from users. The most important lesson learned was that encouraging adoption among tradespeople who tend to resist switching tools was harder than expected and required a mindset shift to longer-term engagement. A forthcoming invoicing feature is expected to increase value and adoption, along with a supporting marketing campaign aimed to educate users on the benefits of professional quoting. As of writing, over 600 quotes were being sent daily, with about 25% accepted within a week.

Design iterations

Follows a small selection of screens from major milestones along the 18 month journey, that shows where we started and how our thinking and UX evolved over time.

Stage 1

Our earliest wireframe prototypes were trying to solve the problems of task hierarchy and organisation. We explored concepts of creating ‘spaces’ (e.g. a room, the roof, or a garden) that became containers inside which you could build out the tasks, allowing more targeted pricing. A ‘task basket’ was another idea we explored that allowed you to select all the tasks you might want to add for a job or space in advance (like a survey), before fleshing out the details.

Stage 2

In this phase of the project we considered more of the navigation around and through a quote. We envisaged each quote having it’s own menu slide out from the side, freeing up space for specific tasks in the main UI. We were still considering spaces as an organisational fundamental but began categorising these spaces into groups (interior, exterior & grounds) that allowed us to be more intelligent with task suggestion.

Stage 3

By this stage we had doubled down on the hierarchy and started to solve the navigation issues created by our content organisation approach - nesting tasks within tasks, within tasks. We attempted to visually show how many levels deep inside tasks you had navigated and created populated quote content views to reflect this hierarchy and display the connected nature of the tasks in the job.

Stage 4

Taking a step back outside of the quote, we began to think of the ‘job’, inside which multiple quotes and versions can live. We also explored adding the final missing piece of the quotes - pricing schedules, terms and conditions and different ways of previewing your finished quote before sending.

Stage 5

By this stage we were thinking beyond the quote. We started thinking about the larger vision of having invoicing and expenses. We made ‘sitemaps’ to understand the full scope of functionality and group them into a logical navigation for the app. At the time we thought it would be useful to create a CRM for customer data that had interconnected data throughout the system. We later simplified a lot of this thinking down to a model that requires less mental overhead and far less navigating around.

We envisioned a tab-bar navigation to get around the app, and a weave of cross-connected data through the major sections with dashboard-like analytics. Unfortunately the complexity of this model confused our users and made it feel more suited to enterprise than a tradesperson. This insight helped us to think through the detail about how we wanted different document types to interact. We then drastically simplified the whole model down quickly to something more understandable.

Stage 6

This version of the app represented our beta launch to the entire user base. We’d standardised the simpler document model (just quotes at the time), and process of editing the quote as a workflow within a stepped process. A job had a continuously editable quote object that you could ‘export’ as different versions of completed quotes to send to customers for feedback or approval.

Stage 7

This final stage is where we introduced invoices as a document type, meaning we needed to rethink the existing document model. Based on previous ideas, we used the job as the unifying container. As part of a major component and styles consolidation exercise we introduced a new design system that standardised hundreds of components into a more manageable and flexible system. We used colour-coding to help differentiate the document types and indicate what you were editing/viewing at any given time.