CATEGORY
UX/UI Design
YEAR
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
TEAM
Minsung K, Kristi K
Homeowners have endless inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram, but still can't move forward. They don't know their budget, and they don't know who to trust.
How might we help homeowners connect with the right designer, with less guesswork?
Emily is 43 and planning her first big renovation. She knows what she likes when she sees it, but can't put it into words, and has no idea what any of it should cost.
Add additional project content here.
We looked at Houzz, Instagram, and Archello and found the same pattern across all three: everyone helps you explore. No one helps you decide.
Portfolio browsing and style discovery are solved problems. Designer comparison and budget visibility are not. None of the platforms we reviewed offered either.
We designed Haven in two phases, Understand the homeowner first, then match them.
Home. Homeowners can browse designer picks and style-based inspiration before signing up, so they can explore before committing to anything.
Onboarding (mine). A visual style quiz, no design vocabulary needed, paired with a budget estimate based on ZIP code and project type. We also explored generating an isometric room from a moodboard, to make someone's taste feel real before they talk to a designer.
I built the quiz questions around two things homeowners actually needed to resolve early: trust, meaning would this designer get their taste, and customization, meaning how specific their style preferences could get without needing design vocabulary. That's what shaped which questions made the cut and which felt like noise.
Matching. Designers are shown side by side with project history and reviews, instead of an open portfolio scroll. Each profile surfaces budget fit and past client feedback up front, so homeowners aren't judging designers on photos alone.
[Try the prototype →]
I designed the onboarding experience — the visual taste flow, the budget-framing step, and the AI-generated room visualization concept — while collaborating with the team on the overall problem framing, competitive analysis, and designer matching flow.
I designed the onboarding experience — the visual taste flow, the budget-framing step, and the AI-generated room visualization concept — while collaborating with the team on the overall problem framing, competitive analysis, and designer matching flow.
I designed the onboarding experience — the visual taste flow, the budget-framing step, and the AI-generated room visualization concept — while collaborating with the team on the overall problem framing, competitive analysis, and designer matching flow.
I designed the onboarding experience — the visual taste flow, the budget-framing step, and the AI-generated room visualization concept — while collaborating with the team on the overall problem framing, competitive analysis, and designer matching flow.
Protothon reinforced how much a good problem statement matters under time pressure. The moment we reframed the challenge from "help people find a designer" to "help people decide," the rest of the design followed naturally.
A judge specifically called out our onboarding flow as clean and well-executed, but scored the overall UI design as needing improvement, which tracked with how little time we had.
Given the timeline, we moved from research directly into high-fidelity Figma screens rather than testing the onboarding flow with real users first. With more time, that's the first thing I'd want to validate, whether the visual taste flow actually produces matches homeowners trust.n here.