As a product designer at DecorAR I have designed an AI tool that understand the principles of a good design (a virtual interior design) to offer a fun and seamless experience (personalised and immersive shopping experience) online to reach more customers.
Why there is a need for creating a Virtual interior designer?
Problem statement (Customer POV): Inspirational Shoppers need a way to reassure about choosing furnitures because there is lots of choice and they do not have interior design skills and they fear making an incorrect choice that may not align with their needs and style.
Problem statement (Business POV): Furniture Retailers need a way to align with each customer's unique style, needs, and preferences (Hyper-Personalization) because they want to increase the conversion rate and cultivate long-term loyalty.
This project needed heavy research from the outset due to low problem clarity and high risk.
I have completed a design thinking project by starting from conducting a market analysis.
We target the furniture retailers in France at first, which is as big as 24 billion euros. For the moment 23% of total revenue is through the online channel, which is forecasted to grow to 34% by 2024. Having known this trend, the retailers are not ready yet to improve their customers' shopping experience as approved by our studies.
In the world of online design services, there are several competitors out there. To better understand existing market, I've conducted competitive analysis exploring four types of competitors:
Claudia Marcela / Interior Designer
We hired an Interior designer to gain a deeper understanding of her clients' needs and expectations regarding interior design and gain insight into the services they provide. It enabled us to know about the interaction of human interior designers and their clients. This knowledge helped us to design a product that minimizes the gap between humans and machines in terms of interaction.
I conducted a survey to validate the hypothesis and find demographic information and also know more about psychographic and behavioral attributes of participants.
We conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with some participants through facebook groups and those one that participated in the survey. It allowed us to gain a more holistic understanding of how people think and behave want to buy new furnitures or when they want to design their home, and what their needs are..
Sara is an Inspirational shopper, her behaviour is similar to what we expect from our users who will spend more time finding inspiration and confirmation of their choices.
In the world of online design services, there are several competitors out there. To better understand existing market, I've conducted competitive analysis exploring four types of competitors:
Solution : Make it personal
Provide an online personalised interaction through a visual questionnaire to find what kind of environment, style and color people like and match with their requirements so it provides personalized products based on the information collected from users.
Solution : Augmented Reality (AR) & Diminished reality.
Provide an AR platform that helps shoppers to visualise the product at their home.
Solution : Understand Space & Decoration
Provide a platform to analyze the user's actual space (LiDAR sensors can create the floor plan of their home and can calculate the right dimension) and decoration, through scanning with their mobile phone.
I used WoZ to test user reactions to the concept before investing resources in full development. To understand what style and color the user likes, I created a visual questionnaire in collaboration with the interior designer, I get inspired by the way she get information from her clients. We included 16 different styles in the questionnaire.
I asked two potential users to provide me some necessary information.
Subsequently, I provided all the collected data to the interior designer, who selected products tailored to the users' needs based on this information. These selections were then shared with the users through a Slack channel named "AI Interior Designer". Users were invited to express their satisfaction with the results and to interact with what they believed was an AI, allowing us to observe their needs, behavior, and expectations.
I Collaborated with the interior designer to design the new version of the VQ.
Coming soon !
