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Halftank Studio Fuel: product discovery finds new opportunities, and an OOUX teardown of Lowe’s 🛠️

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UX and product professionals all have their toolboxes of practices for making discoveries. Sometimes, even those toolboxes are insufficient when encountering a unique problem. This happens when you find a problem that is so unique that no precedent exists. Because there is no precedent, you need to figure out if this is an outlier or an emerging trend. Recently, I found an emerging trend that does not have a good solution yet. The strategist in me sees an opportunity.

The product landscape around home renovations is complex, but the project that I have been doing the past year adds another layer of complexity, and that layer will be a growing problem shortly.

I’ve been renovating my mother’s house from 500 miles away. I’m doing this as she is in assisted living and needs the potential rent on the house to pay for her long-term care.

This project has brought its own set of frustrations with the processes involved with getting work done on houses - often with years of deferred maintenance - in places far from one’s residence. I think that in the next few years, this will be a growing issue as boomers age and will need more in-home and nursing home care. More adult children will need to be able to work on houses remotely once they become caregivers for their parents.

Hiring a local contractor can be prohibitively expensive, so what I’ve been doing is using Lowe’s as a contracting partner for many of my projects. I initially chose this route as there are stores both where I live and where she lives. You work with installation experts from Lowe’s, who work with a network of contractors to get projects done. You pay Lowe’s one project fee for both materials and labor, and Lowe’s pays the local contractor once the work is completed. In my case (so far), I have used Lowe’s to:

• Gut and rebuild an unusable master bathroom. Lowe’s owns a company called ReBath that just handles these types of renovations.
• Replacing all the original single-pane 90s-era windows with energy-efficient double-pane windows.
• Replacing all of the flooring, most of which had 90s original carpet in poor condition. Fun fact I learned: Lowe’s owns the Stainmaster brand so if you want Stainmaster carpets, Lowe’s is your only option.

The main issues that I have experienced as part of this process are that:

• Lowe’s is a national chain, but the inventory systems at local stores don’t talk to one another. I wanted to be able to do things like choose flooring at the store near me, but I couldn’t.
• Payment options vary wildly depending on the service and I could not pay at the store near me for any of them. This revealed a dark pattern, as Lowe’s really really wants you to pay using one of their credit cards. I’ve been using a HELOC and paying from another state, so my HELOC credit card didn’t work because the amounts were too high. To pay Lowe's, I wrote a check, mailed it to my brother, who would hand deliver it to the local Lowe’s. I can’t see this process being convenient for a lot of people who are trying to renovate houses from afar.

If you are at all familiar with Object-Oriented UX, communication issues between branches of the same large national chain are made for the ORCA process. However, the problem I just described is so unique that none of my usual discovery tricks got the results I needed. For example, my searches on YouTube for Lowe’s installation service process got me nowhere. A lot of people on YT can tell you about Lowe’s installations on their houses, but I found no one talking about the actual buying process which was preventing me from getting to the installation phase.

So I had a perfect OOUX-y problem and no noun foraging sources to examine. I need to forage for nouns somewhere to build out my system object matrix. In the ORCA process, it starts with the O in the process, the nouns. Those nouns become your system’s objects, and they provide the basis for the rest of the ORCA process: the relationships between objects, the calls-to-action, and the attributes of each object. Briefly, I was stuck.

I will geek out on my eventual foraging results in the next newsletter, but I did a remix of the noun foraging process by combining:

• The nouns from Lowe’s installation home page. Warning: there are a LOT of nouns on this page to parse out.
• A journey map of my buying process, which had a lot of in-person touchpoints and long phone calls to Lowe’s sales representatives, most of whom specialize in one service.

To conclude: Yes, you can not only use OOUX and the ORCA process to discover opportunities to solve brand-new problems, but you can also incorporate UX discovery techniques, like journey mapping, into the process to get the data you need to build a system for your solution. The ORCA process makes the tools you already have more powerful and impactful.

Want to find new problems to solve? You can download my free eBook about how ORCA can fix four everyday product issues. Or you can contact me to coach you through the process.

And if you know anyone who works for Lowe’s, maybe forward this email to them?