Simplifying quoting for home service businesses

Upcraft was losing customers to platforms that offered more ways to manage their work. We needed to understand what home service providers were missing and help them get value from the app faster.

Research suggested providers spent around two hours of an eight-hour workday dealing with payments. Our aim was to reduce that to one hour, giving them more time to do the work they were hired for.

I interviewed six users, spoke with local home service providers, and reviewed sales calls and competing products. The sample was small, but the interviews revealed a consistent need for more professional ways to quote and collect payments.

• Five of the six participants struggled with online payments.
• Four of the six were still sending handwritten quotes.
• All six wanted to send professional invoices.

I translated the findings into requirements and user stories for Quotes. For Payments, I revisited ten sales recordings to understand how providers already collected money. Together with the Product Manager, we prioritized quotes, payments, invoices, and jobs.

Turning research into requirements for Quotes.

Payment insights gathered from sales recordings.

For Quotes, we explored whether the feature should live inside a conversation or have its own section. We also considered showing performance indicators, then removed them when we realized they weren't what providers needed in this flow.

Exploring the quoting flow before moving into final screens.

Quotes launched as a dedicated section in the navigation. Providers could create a professional quote and send it to a client, with the work organized in one place.

The final Quotes experience.

Payments followed a simpler principle: get work first, arrange payment later. The flow starts in a conversation, where a provider can send a payment link. We worked with the payment provider to reduce account setup to six questions, while recognizing that onboarding was still a barrier.

Working through payment setup and requests.

The final Payments experience.

• Providers sent 24 quotes in the first week after launch.
• The project reported a 14% decrease in churn.
• Only 30% of the user base had created a payment account as of August 2023, showing that setup still needed work.

Launch also exposed smaller issues: quote screens that loaded slowly, hidden terms, and inputs that needed a numeric keyboard. For payments, account activation, error handling, and receipts remained important areas to improve.

The lesson was that shipping a useful feature and making it easy to adopt are separate challenges. More interviews and user testing were needed to refine the experience, alongside the planned Jobs section.