THE CLIENT

Tiny Toronto

Tiny Toronto is a startup that plans on building and selling tiny homes as living solutions. Their current brand is centered around creating affordable housing in cities. They plan on using existing unutilized space, backyards, to develop affordable housing in the city.  

Housing regulations within Canada, do not permit the use of a tiny home as a living space. Instead, they want to pivot their product into an external office space for homeowners. 

Their current website does not reflect this change in the product's market. My Team and I were brought on to help Tinyto redesign their website to reflect their shift in product strategy. 

Going into the project we wanted to test their product hypothesis.

"Homeowners are interested in buying an external unit to use as office space." Since it was a significant shift in the product positioning, it was important that it was adequately tested and vetted to minimize any risk. To test their hypothesis, we conducted user interviews and sent out surveys to homeowners. 

The results from our survey were quite surprising the majority of homeowners were interested in using the space to pursue their hobbies and personal projects. Some wanted to use the room for model trains, others woodworking. Most people were not interested in using the space as a living solution. When conducting our research we spoke to a belgium tiny-home startup, that had dealt with the same problem, their customers were not actually living in the homes they built. 

Tinyto's target market had shifted.

Originally the site messaging was about affordability and had targeted lower-income individuals. With the new direction and our research,  it became apparent that the Tinyto's audience was now high-income homeowners looking for extra space. To make sure our designs adhered to this change in the audience we created a Persona, John. John serves as a guidepost for our design decision making.

For example:

We used John to inform our branding. John wants relief away from his family, so with that in mind, we named the product Solace. Which encompasses that sentiment. 

The previous version of their site did not have an example of the product. It was essential to have a visual representation of the product so that users could quickly understand Tinyto's offering at a glance.  As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1000 words.

Problem: The pivot conflicted with Tinyto's existing brand.

Tinyto shift in brad was quite jarring moving from a way to create affordable housing, to a means to expand ones home, was substantially different and at odds with one another. Affordable housing to home expansions flips the script from a low-income bracket of consumers to a higher bracket income. These two users are very much at odds. One of our solutions was to rebrand Tinyto to Solace. Our reasoning being:

Pros
- The word "Tiny" and "Toronto" are no longer reflective of the product.
- Ability to narrow down the focus of the website.
- Prevents conflicting messaging.

Cons
- Alienate existing supporters

Our decision: We felt that scrapping the current brand was a significant decision. Given our timeline, it felt unreasonable to ask our client to make such a large decision. Instead, we recommended he consider rebranding in the future and explained the pros and cons.

User Testing

With our design, we knew we wanted to prominently showcase the product on the homepage. Our assumption at the time was that people would be able to get a grasp of the product immediately. However, we found when testing the homepage was that users didn't have a clear idea of what the product was and that it was named Solace. Our solution was to add a clear line underneath the banner explaining the product in a straightforward fashion. 

Something else we learned from user testing was that individuals had an ah-ha moment when viewing the product page. They could see all the possibilities for the uses of the space and it gave people ideas about how they would use the product themselves. This idea originally came from research and the amount of variance between the use cases.

The End Result

With our final design, we walked a fine line of managing to find a balance between Tinyto and its new direction with Solace. The use of white space provides a feeling of openness and helped to emphasize the idea of endless possibilities. The product mockup we created helped give users a clear picture of what the actual product will be like. Overall the client was happy with the end result and research insights we were able to provide him with.