Signature Homes

The challenge

Signature Homes builds communities in the southeastern US and works closely with homebuyers to personalize all the selections in their home. Outstanding customer experience is central to their business model, but they were struggling with long soft cycle times, laborious processes, and homebuyers who were overwhelmed by the decisions required. They wanted to introduce a digital portal that would help streamline their process for both their employees and their customers.

Defining our approach

After an initial design workshop with the client, we conducted research interviews with seven homebuyers and eight Signature Homes employees in order to gain a deeper understanding of the home building journey, as well as uncover any pain points and delights that occur throughout the process. We used this research to home in on the focus area for the MVP of the product.

We found four themes in our research: Design Decisions, Communication, Processes, and Customer Experience. We presented both the positive and negative findings for those themes to the client, broken out by feedback from the customers and the employees.

Based on our findings, we also created journey maps for the homebuyers and the employees, and then overlaid those maps in order to highlight where the lowest points of the journey were. Using our data and the journey maps, we were able to make the decision with Signature Homes to focus on improving the process of the design appointment, which is when homebuyers must make all the selections for the finishes in their home. They receive a large printed catalog outlining all the options, and many homebuyers expressed that they were overwhelmed by the choices. The interior designers at Signature Homes also had to spend a great deal of time preparing for the meeting, answering questions, and then inputting selections into the system afterwards.