Haven
Reimagining Hospital Bedside Communication Hardware
Role
Team Leader
Timeline
2026
Team
3 members
Skills
UX/UI Design
Background
This project was created for Protothon 2026,
a 24-hour UX design challenge.
The goal was to design a platform that helps homeowners
find, evaluate, and connect with the right interior designer.
Context
The remodeling market is large. The decision-making process is broken.
This project was created for Protothon 2026, a 24-hour UX design challenge. The brief asked teams to design a platform that connects homeowners with interior designers. Through initial research, three data points were identified that reframed the problem — the challenge was not discovery, but confidence.
39%
Use Pinterest as a search engine
Homeowners rely on images to explore style before they can describe it in words.
Visual intent precedes verbal clarity
Source: Pinterest research
20%
Struggled to get a clear estimate
Without a cost reference point, most first conversations began with mismatched expectations.
Cost ambiguity delays commitment
Source: Houzz Renovation Trends 2026
$600B
U.S. remodeling market size
A large and growing market still largely dependent on referrals, guesswork, and informal process.
Scaled demand, unscaled process
Source: Harvard JCHS Housing Report
Planning
We established project planning through client collaboration and comprehensive research on healthcare technology design.
A primary persona was defined to ground the sprint. Emily represents the homeowner who is ready to renovate but stalls before making first contact — a pattern identified as the central design problem.
I know what I like when I see it, but I don’t know how to explain it or who can actually bring it to life.
About
43 years old
Mother of two
Planning her first major home renovation
Behaviors
Saves inspiration from Pinterest and Instagram
Compares designer portfolios and reviews
Relies on recommendations before reaching out
Pain Points
Can recognize styles visually, but struggles to describe them
Unsure what renovation costs should realistically look like
Finds it difficult to confidently choose the right designer
Key Insight
Emily has a clear visual taste, but lacks the confidence and language to make decisions
Competitive Analysis
Most platforms help users browse inspiration, not evaluate designers.
Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and Houzz make it easy to discover interior inspiration and portfolios. However, comparing designers, understanding realistic budgets, and evaluating project fit still require significant manual research outside the platform.
Key Insight
Homeowners arrive prepared. The process itself creates the friction.
Mapping the homeowner journey revealed a consistent pattern: strong motivation and visual taste on one side — no structured path to act on either on the other. The gap was not desire, but infrastructure.
What homeowners bring
Visual Preference
Homeowners respond emotionally to spaces long before they know the correct design vocabulary.
Budget Awareness
Users want realistic expectations before reaching out, not after a consultation begins.
Designer Compatibility
People look for signals that a designer understands their lifestyle, taste, and project scale.
Where the process breaks down
No reliable trust layer
Portfolios show outcomes, but rarely explain budget alignment, execution quality, or process transparency.
No Cost Confidence
Most platforms surface inspiration without helping users understand realistic project costs.
Weak Matching Signals
Homeowners are forced to judge designers through fragmented signals like Instagram posts, referrals, or inconsistent reviews.
Four friction points were identified. Four goals were set.
Four design goals were established — each targeted at a specific point where homeowners lost confidence and disengaged from the process.
01
Taste Finding
An image-based preference flow was designed to translate visual instinct into a communicable aesthetic profile — no design vocabulary required.
02
Budget
A cost-framing tool was introduced early in onboarding, generating realistic project ranges from ZIP code, home type, and scope.
03
Trust
Designer profiles were restructured to surface compatibility signals — budget alignment, project type history, and client review patterns.
Solution
Haven was designed
to front-load clarity.
A two-phase flow was designed — onboarding first, matching second. By the time a recommendation appeared, the homeowner's taste, budget, and project context had already been established.
The focus was not on broader discovery, but on compressing the gap between inspiration and first contact.
Phase 1
Onboarding
Self-understanding before any designer is introduced
01
Taste Discovery
A visual selection flow was designed to build an aesthetic profile through image-based choices. Pinterest import was supported to leverage existing inspiration.
02
A cost estimation model was surfaced at onboarding, generating a realistic project range from ZIP code, home type, and scope before any designer was introduced.
Phase 2
Matching
Context-informed recommendations, not open browsing
03
Project Setup
A structured project brief was collected and attached to the homeowner's profile — eliminating the need to re-explain goals across multiple conversations.
04
Budget Framing
A shortlist of three to five designers was generated with explicit match reasoning across style, budget, and project type — replacing open browsing with context-informed selection.
Overview
Helping homeowners find the right interior designer with more confidence.
Hackerthon Version
Understanding taste and budget through onboarding.
Designer matching was shaped around taste, scope, budget, and trust.
The platform combined visual preferences, project information, estimated budget ranges, and trust signals such as reviews and portfolio relevance to help homeowners evaluate designers more confidently before the first conversation.
Feedback
What They Said
From Judge
Strengths
Minimalist Branding
Onboarding Flow
Competitive Analysis
Presentation
Improvements
Designer verification Flow
Registration UX
Design Iterations
What's next
01
Build out a designer verification flow to strengthen trust and platform credibility among users.
02
Continue exploring design iterations and lean into what's already working to push it further.
Iterated After Feedback
The onboarding flow was redesigned into a more progressive experience.
The revised flow reduced cognitive load by reorganizing the onboarding sequence and introducing Pinterest-based inspiration import earlier in the experience.
Designer onboarding focused on verification before portfolio creation.
The updated onboarding prioritized identity verification and basic profile setup before deeper platform participation. Portfolio creation was intentionally excluded from onboarding to keep the initial flow lightweight and focused.
Matching
Building trust before the first consultation.
The discovery and designer matching flow was designed to help homeowners evaluate designers through style fit, budget expectations, and project credibility before the first conversation.
Structured filtering, verified designer indicators, and project based trust signals were introduced to reduce uncertainty throughout the matching experience.
Trust Signals
Making designer trust easier to evaluate before contact.
These UI cards were designed to help homeowners assess designer fit with more confidence before requesting a consultation. Verified project badges, client confirmed reliability metrics, and past project budget ranges were surfaced together so that style, credibility, and cost expectations could be evaluated.
Personal Boards
Turning saved inspiration into clearer design direction.
Boards helped homeowners collect visual references before defining their style preferences more clearly.
Users could organize inspiration into personal boards.
Cost ranges were estimated based on location and project type.
AI-generated isometrics translated moodboards into spatial previews.
The concept explored how AI-generated isometric rooms could help homeowners quickly visualize the overall mood and spatial direction emerging from their saved inspiration.
Reflection
Key takeaways from the protothone.
Protothon reinforced how important it is to communicate product thinking clearly within a limited amount of time. The experience also showed how valuable iterative feedback can be in shaping stronger design decisions. Many later revisions were influenced directly by critique around trust, onboarding clarity, and platform credibility.
What I would want to explore in a future iteration…
If the project were developed further, I would want to expand the platform beyond discovery and matching into more detailed project setup and management experiences. This could include milestone-based payments, clearer scope alignment between homeowners and designers, renovation progress tracking, and lightweight dispute resolution systems throughout the project lifecycle.