Case study · End-to-end app
Most apps are designed for a user. Homzy is designed for a household — helping Indian families navigate the biggest, longest, most crowded decision of their lives: building a home from scratch.
Building a house in India means coordinating architects, contractors, materials, budgets, Vaastu and — crucially — the whole family. That journey is scattered across word of mouth, YouTube and a dozen disconnected services.
One guided journey from inspiration to interior: matched professionals via a guided questionnaire, a materials and furniture marketplace, and community features that digitise the trust families currently find only through word of mouth.
An 82-response survey and 10 user interviews revealed a multi-stakeholder decision process — 42% involved a spouse, 33% parents — that no competitor was designing for.
Post-Covid, Indian consumers moved decisively online for everything from groceries to furniture — but home construction stayed analogue, fragmented and stressful. First-time home builders don't know where to start (managing finance? finding references? contacting experts?), can't judge which professionals to trust, and coordinate the whole thing across a family where everyone has a say. The brief: bring the entire journey into one place.
Research ran in three layers: secondary research mining hundreds of posts and reviews across Quora, Google Reviews, Facebook groups, the Play Store and Houzz forums — thematically coded into patterns like fraud, budget overruns and labour shortages; a competitive study of six platforms (Havenly, Brick&Bolt, MakeMyHouse, Houzz, ZingyHomes, Homify); and primary research with an 82-response survey plus 10 qualitative interviews. Three findings shaped everything that followed.
42% of respondents said their spouse was involved in the process, 33% their parents, 21% their children. Interviews confirmed it: decisions about layouts, finances and even paint colours were negotiated across generations. A family persona mapped who owned which decision — finance, design, approvals — through each stage.
78% found their expert through word of mouth or friends and family; 53% contacted an architect first and let that person assemble everything else. People weren't searching for professionals — they were searching for someone they could believe. Any app replacing that chain needed to carry its trust signals: testimonials, credentials, visible past work.
The most-cited first step was managing finance (46%), and the stages people most wanted involvement in were designing plans (79%) and interior design (67%). Inspiration flowed from YouTube (73%) and Google (63%) — and post-completion, families said finalising the design was the most time-consuming stage. The app had to serve inspiration, planning, construction and interiors as one continuum.
"Nobody builds a house alone in India. The design question wasn't 'what does the user need' — it was 'how does a family decide.'"
Because families trust recommendations over search, the professionals flow inverts the marketplace pattern: a three-step guided questionnaire captures the project (floors, bedrooms, plot size), the professional type needed, and the family's preferred architectural style — then recommends matched experts, each carrying the trust signals research demanded: credentials, portfolios, testimonials and ratings.
The IA organises the app around the stages families actually move through — inspiration, information, professionals, marketplace, community — rather than isolated features. The home screen leads with "Build a Home" as the primary action, with curated inspiration and discussion feeding the earlier, messier phases of the journey.
Because the journey continues past construction into fixtures and furniture — the stage families called most frustrating — the store organises by room and by style, spanning furniture, décor and raw materials, so the same app that found your architect furnishes your living room.
The brand pairs Playfair Display with Poppins on a deep, grounded green — home as growth and stability rather than a transaction. The full flow was mapped, wireframed and taken to hi-fi across login, home, professionals, store and community.
Homzy is a research-grounded 0→1 concept. If I continued it, I'd test the questionnaire's matching quality with real professionals, and design explicitly multi-user features — shared boards, decision votes, role-based views — because the research says the account holder is never deciding alone.
What it taught me: when the real unit of decision-making is a group, "user-centred" design has to widen its lens. The most important screen I designed wasn't a screen at all — it was the questionnaire logic that translated a family's messy, negotiated needs into something a marketplace could answer.