The Home Depot


Paris

Store Operations - Tasking

June 2020 - August 2020

In a company with nearly 10,000 software engineers, there is no one internal source to find news, information, or resources specifically geared towards them. That is, before my team and I designed engineering.homedepot.com.

Some of the things I did:
  • Facilitated research interviews, usability testing, and synthesis sessions among Home Depot associates
  • Facilitated design studios and design critiques
  • Used prototyping softwares such as InVision, Sketch, and Axure to design the website
  • Collaborated with Product Managers and stakeholders as the creation of this website has been a goal of theirs for years
  • Worked on a balanced team and applied agile methodologies to my workflow

The Problem:

There are nearly 10,000 software engineers at The Home Depot. However there is no one source for them to get tools, resources, or information. To get a question answered or find out information, they have to visit a multitude of different websites, or reach out to several different people and wait for a response, thus interrupting their (and other's!) workflows.

The Solution:

The creation of engineering.homedepot.com, an internal one-stop-shop for all things software engineering related at Home Depot.

How I did it:

Research, research, research

As the full stack UXer on the team, I conducted a ton of research to learn more about Software Engineers at Home Depot, what their pain points are, what resources they use, and if they would even use this website as a resource. This involved conducting:

  • A survey
    • Image of survey

    The survey was a great way for me to learn more foundational knowledge about how Software Engineering works at Home Depot. I learned what tools and resources software engineers most commonly use, what resources they like and don’t like, what kind of content they would expect on this website, and, most importantly, would they even use this website as a resource.

  • A design studio
    • Design studio

    After gaining foundational knowledge about Software Engineers, I was able to facilitate a design studio to learn more about how they would expect this website to look, what content they would like to see on it, and overall get inspiration and ideas on how to start designing this site.

  • User interviews
    • User interviews
    Lastly, I facilitated user interviews with Software Engineers. I was able to understand exactly what engineer’s specific problems are, their pain points, and how they would truly interact with this website. Before the user interviews, the scale of who we were designing for was massive. I didn’t have a specific persona, or really a specific problem I was solving. The interviews helped to target specific problems and allowed me to come up with specific design solutions to fix them.


    The Personas

    Initially, the users of the website was "all Software Engineers at Home Depot." I quickly realized this blanket statement for a user is way too vague to create a quality MVP for. So after some research and talking to stakholders, I narrowed this down to three main personas:
  • New Hires
  • Subject Matter Experts
  • Software Engineers looking for websites/resources


    • The Design Solution:

    Website design

    The website ended up having three different pages to address the three different persona's and their respective pain points.



    The Value

    Reduced time searching for answers and resources + More visibility and knowledge sharing across teams = More productive time spent writing code and working on products

    Lessons Learned



    Lessons learned



    Design is messy! Research is messy! Sometimes when you take one step forward, you have to take 5 steps back. And thats ok. It's ok to mess up, or do some of the steps out of order. As long as you are always keeping the user and the end goal in mind.

    I also learned the value of storytelling. This internship was completed 100% remotely, and I had 7 presentations, and over 15 practice presenations over the course of 9 weeks. 3 of those presentations had C-suite level employees in them. I learned not only the value in creating a clear and concise story, but also being able to create and deliver one myself.