CertainTeed is a century-old manufacturer of high-end building materials for contractors and construction professionals. But those customers were just a tiny fraction of the population who use building products. (Who doesn’t love fixing up their garage after watching This Old House?) CertainTeed wanted to reach the millions of homeowners and DIY’ers who fancied themselves handy with home repairs. But how?
My design research team was created from scratch to answer this question. CertainTeed suspected that the expectations of homeowners would differ from those of professionals, and my team delivered an outline of exactly what those differences were, as well as proposed paths to reach DIY’ers and broadly expand the target market.
My role was as a design researcher and strategist, and included creating a three-stage research strategy for qualitative discovery and market segmentation, quantitative market sizing, and targeted qualitative deep dive research. I co-led all aspects of the work, from project roadmap and research planning, to conducting user interviews, data analysis and synthesis, and delivering reports and recommendations.
We planned our work with 3 phases to identify the different types of DIY homeowners. First we asked fifty people to complete a 1-week journal of their home renovations, and we conducted in-depth interviews with 15 of them to understand the phases of their work.
We used this understanding to deploy a survey to 2,400 people to quantify what separated different types of DIY’ers. Big shoutouts to our colleagues at Breakthrough Marketing for their work in designing and analyzing the survey. The results helped us identify 6 priority segments of homeowners with which to conduct in-depth, in-home interviews about what motivates people to fix up their homes and what factors into their decisions around DIY renovations.
Images from the final report and data analysis (requires password).
Outcomes
Our team ultimately delivered a research report with recommendations detailing the characteristics and priorities of 6 user groups, four of which were determined to be target segments. Stakeholders from R&D and marketing accompanied the research team on interviews along the way to appreciate firsthand the complexities that drive people to go DIY.
This work led CertainTeed to start 3 new human-centered design projects that would drive the company to a deeper understanding of how customers relate to home renovation products, messaging, and brands.
Project Statistics
Role: Design Researcher and Strategist
Dates: Jan. 2016 – Nov. 2016
Client: This was my in-house role at CertainTeed / Saint-Gobain
Skills and methods: Design research · User interviews · Presentations · Strategic roadmaps · User behavior · Workshops · Customer journey maps · Personas · Group facilitation · Visual communication · Team leadership · Constructive feedback · Co-creation · Creativity skills · Video production · Design thinking
Top image by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
Russell Flench 