27% fewer project failures through AR innovation

The context

Wayfair Design Services is a two-sided marketplace. Customers pay interior designers to create room designs. The process starts with onboarding: share your room dimensions, style preferences, and budget. Designers take it from there.

I was Senior Manager of Experience Design, leading the approach and strategy with a three-person cross-discipline team, part of a larger group of eight content, design, and research practitioners.

The friction

Projects were stalling. Customers were canceling. Designers were spending hours on rework before the actual design could begin. The friction looked like a dozen different problems depending on where you stood.

The root cause

I led a research program across both sides of the marketplace: diary studies, interviews, contextual inquiries, data analysis, and journey mapping. Everything converged on a single root cause: the floor plan.

Customers had to measure their rooms and submit a plan before designers could start. The tools they used ranged from tape measures to rope to their own feet. It took three to five days on average. The results were inconsistent, incomplete, and frequently unusable.

Designers received what customers sent and usually started over. Measurements they couldn't verify. Sketches they couldn't scale. The design work couldn't begin until the floor plan was rebuilt.

One friction point was creating problems on both sides of the marketplace. Solving it would improve the experience for customers and designers simultaneously.

The solution

I facilitated a cross-functional brainstorm that generated six potential solutions, then led a feasibility assessment scoring each on scope, dependencies, scalability, ease of use, and deliverable quality. An AR floor plan capture tool scored highest. Wayfair's innovation team had the underlying AR technology ready but no product team had built with it yet. This was the first. I directed the design team through execution.

The platform play

I designed the tool for more than Design Services from day one. The same floor plan problem existed across Wayfair's product portfolio. The self-serve 3D room planner needed it. Other tools needed it. Building for one team while designing for the platform was a deliberate choice.

The outcome

90% of clients who encountered the tool used it. Breakages and refunds dropped 27%. The capability spread across multiple Wayfair products.