The Home Depot Helps Doers Get More Done.

Revisiting the Accessibility of a Fortune 20’s Interactive Voice Response System

  • Team

    Tamara Davis: Lead UI Designer and Team Manager

    Laura Kluball: Lead Researcher, Conversational Designer, and Point-of-Contact

    Elizabeth Park: Lead Researcher and Conversational Designer

    Dana Seaman: Researcher

  • Duration

    A 3-week design sprint

    Student Client Project

  • Tools

    Figma

    Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

    Microsoft Visio

    Otter AI

    PowerPoint

    Voiceflow

    Zoom

About The Client: The Home Depot Helps Doers Get More Done.

The Home Depot is the largest Home Improvement retailer in the world and currently employs over 500,000 people. Not only is The Home Depot a successful organization from a business standpoint, but they are also active in the community. Team Orange prides themselves on being a human-centered organization, that empowers veterans with the Path to Pro Network, in which they help transitioning veterans and their families find jobs. Additionally, The Home Depot maintains a loyalty to their associates, by writing 90% of their own code in-house. Lastly, one of the most impactful projects carried out by The Home Depot, is the transition to a cordless scan gun in stores; empowering customers to independently check-out and pay for items.

The Challenge

Design a North Star Interactive Voice Response (IVR) experience, by understanding the needs, goals, and frustrations of customers with disabilities, so that we can provide an inclusive customer service experience that serves everybody.

Research Methods

  • Primary

    Stakeholder Interviews

    User Interviews

    User Surveys

    User Testing

    Usability Testing

  • Secondary

    Accessibility Evaluation

    Business Analysis

    Comparative Analysis

    Competitive Analysis

    IVR Heuristic Analysis

We Interviewed As Many Stakeholders and Subject-Matter-Experts As Possible!

To make sure our goals and priorities were aligned with our partners at The Home Depot, our team interviewed as many stakeholders as possible throughout our three-week design sprint.

We spoke with the following partners involved with the project:

  • IVR User Experience Designers

  • IVR Engineers

  • Product Managers

  • Accessibility Experts

  • Call-Center Agent and Customer Service Representatives

  • Former Home Depot Store Associate

Adobe Stock Image

What is the Current State of the IVR System at The Home Depot?

To assess the current state of the IVR system at The Home Depot, our team conducted a heuristic evaluation of the phone system. Each team member called 1-800-Home-Depot, as well as a their local Home Depot Store and analyzed the voice heuristics, based on Stanford University’s adapted voice heuristics.₁

https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2018/speech-he/speech-heuristics-ieeepvc-20180406.pdf₁

Heuristic Evaluation Insights

  • Local Home Depot

    Pros:

    More conversational

    Cons:

    No one answers the phone

    Users are looped to multiple departments

  • 1-800-Home-Depot

    Pros:

    Spanish option

    Cons:

    9 ambiguous prompts

    IVR voice changes

    User error forgiveness

    Mock sincerity, “I’m sorry I didn’t get that…”

    Accessibility

    Feedback through haptics, lighting, tones, etc.

How do Home Depot Customers Prefer to Shop and Communicate with the Store?

After conducting the heuristic evaluation, we knew there were some potential pain points for our customers when reaching out to The Home Depot. Now we wanted to talk to some actual users to figure out what their shopping preferences are, as well as why and how they communicate with The Home Depot.

To do this, we interviewed 12 users, and surveyed 16 people in our networks who shop at Home Improvement Stores.

 

Customer User Interview Guide

As a team we synthesized our user interviews by completing an affinity map and identifying key trends and insights.

What are Users Saying?

 

I want a conversation!

“You have to listen to multiple prompts before getting to where you need to be. It would be nice if a person just picked up the phone and helped in the beginning of the process.”

I don’t like repeating myself!

“The phone "robot" does not always hear me clearly. I have to repeat words multiple times and sometimes I get disconnected if the technology does not understand. Then I have to call back.”

The prompts don’t match my needs!

“The phone does not give me the prompt number for my needs or the technology continues to understand me. I get frustrated and hang up.”

In addition to conducting user interviews, we sent out a survey to our network of Home Depot shoppers.

We wanted to get some more information about how our customers communicate with The Home Depot and what their experiences are like.

Survey

Survey Insights

 

35%

of survey participants said they experienced challenges during the last time they communicated with a business.

 

59%

of surveyed participants said they have terminated communication with a business before their problem was resolved.

 

Our Research Revealed Two Clear Personas

The first persona, “Do-It-For-Me-Dan,” is an elderly gentleman who enjoys spending time in his backyard. He has been a loyal Home Depot Customer since the first store opened in 1979.

The second persona, “Do-It-Yourself Dambi,” is your typical DIY girl who enjoys renovating her new home. Dambi moved to The United States in her 20’s, so English is her second language.

How do Home Depot’s Key Customer’s Experience the Current IVR System?

After defining our target users, we created journey maps to represent Dan and Dambi’s experience with The Home Depot’s current IVR system.

Dan recently purchased a Dewalt 20-volt lawnmower at the Home Depot, but the battery stopped charging. The lawnmower and charging stations are working fine, so he wants to know if he can make a partial exchange. The path below represents Dan’s experience with The Home Depot’s current IVR system.

Dambi just bought tools for her home improvement project and she’s super excited! She calls customer service because she wants to know if her order is ready for pickup. The path below represents Dambi’s experience with The Home Depot’s current IVR system.

The Problem

Home Depot customers and call-center agents need an accessible and streamlined mode of communication to obtain relevant information so that their needs are efficiently resolved.

As a team we conducted a design studio to ideate solutions for the problem.

The Solution

We believe that if we provide users with an accessible and streamlined communication experience that allows for personalized preferences, customers will be more engaged.

We know this to be true if we see increased traffic on Home Depot’s website and reduced time spent connecting to customer service.

We began the design phase by designating roles and responsibilities for designing wireframes and prototypes.

  • Laura Kluball and Ellie Park

    Design conversations and voiceflow prototypes for Dan (Laura) and Dambi (Ellie)

  • Tammie Davis and Dana Seaman

    Design wireframes and Figma prototypes for personalized mobile website profile

I learned how to use Voiceflow prototyping software by watching tutorial videos!

Below is the annotated Voiceflow diagram that I created for “Do-It-For-Me Dan.”

Usability Testing

To ensure that our users were satisfied with the changes we made, we conducted usability testing with our grayscale Figma wireframes and our first iterations of the Voiceflow prototypes.

Mobile website usability test tasks:

  1. Create and verify an account with the Home Depot.

  2. Set up communication preferences in portal.

  3. Sign into existing Home Depot account and make an audio call with closed captions.

Voiceflow usability test tasks:

  1.  Script: “You are frustrated because your battery-powered lawn mower that you just purchased 30 days ago is no longer working and you want to take it back and get a new one. The mower itself is fine, but the battery will no longer charge, even though the charging station is working. You have the receipt for the purchase. Make an audio caption call to ask for instructions about returning your lawn mower battery (not the mower or charging station itself) and follow the prompts, to accomplish your task.”

  2. Script: “Yesterday, you ordered the Ryobi ONE Power Drill and Ryobi ONE 18 Volt Cordless 3/8 inches Drill/Driver Kit on the Home Depot website to pick up in the store. So you are calling Home Depot customer service to check the status of your order. Your zip code is 1 2 3 4 5.”

Insights and Changes Made Based on Usability Testing

  • Insight #1: Mobile Website

    8/8 users were confused where to click when signing in or creating an account.

    Our testing yielded the results that led to a sign-in button here. A clear call-to-action button.

  • Insight #2: Mobile Website

    We also received a lot of feedback for an adjustment in the wording for our secondary call-to-action, changing “Skip for Now” to “Skip and Add Later.”

    “I want the ‘Skip for Now’ button to say ‘Skip and Add Later,’ so I know that if I don’t set my language preferences now, I will be able to do it later."

    - User Quote

  • Insight #3: Mobile Website

    2/2 users found difficulty signing into account and making an audio closed captioning phone call.

    “I like the chat banner. I wish I could contact someone from there.”

    - User Quote

    This led to making the “Chat with Us” banner available on every page, and allowing users to communicate in more ways than just the chat bot.

  • Insight #4: Voiceflow

    Users were frustrated that words were not interchangeable in the phone system. I.e. “exchange” for “return.”

    The 2nd iteration implemented an enhanced “capture feature” with the word exchange encoded in the flow. IVR systems will work best when AI software is implemented to capture the “big picture” of the user experience and we are able to continuously improve the algorithms that build these systems.

    “I wanted it [IVR] to pick up on the word ‘exchange.’ It had ‘return,’ but I wanted to ‘exchange,’ not return… I liked that it recognized my order and asked if that was the one I was talking about.”

    - User Quote

Prototypes AFTER Usability Testing

Voiceflow Prototype

 

Dan’s IVR experience AFTER usability testing.

Voiceflow Prototype

 

Dambi’s IVR experience AFTER usability testing.

Mobile Website Prototype

Reflection

The Home Depot project was challenging, but also incredibly rewarding. This was the first time that we were exposed to interactive voice response system design, so we had a lot to learn in a very short period of time. Throughout this three-week design sprint, we worked hard to meet with as many stakeholders as possible, so that we could learn about the project goals and objectives from all perspectives.

As a conversational designer, I watched countless tutorial videos and collaborated with my colleague, Ellie, to learn how to use Voiceflow prototyping software and problem solve when we ran into roadblocks.

If we had another 6 months to work on this project, we have so many ideas we would love to help implement. We feel that we could enhance the IVR and chatbot personality by giving it a voice that represents the mission and eight core values of The Home Depot. Additionally, we would continue to improve the accessibility of both the IVR system, and the website platforms. In the last section, next steps are listed in greater detail.

Next Steps

  • Interactive Voice Response System

    Enhance personality

    Increased context comprehension with AI

    Additional guidance and prompting

    Natural language

    Empathetic response-match tone, language, need of customer

    Increased accessibility

  • Website

    Information architecture

    Continued Personalization

    ADA compliance in color choice

    Search feature specific to tools (DIY projects)

    Pinterest on profile

    Autosave preferences

    Language preferences change entire experience on website

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