a construction manual, for people who never read one
The raw material was a construction manual: every fact, written for engineers. A family building their first house stops reading at the first technical specification.
the job was to keep every fact, and lose every barrier.
sixty people, three rounds, three tests
I did not rewrite from taste. With the research team in Berlin, I interviewed sixty people across three diverse rounds, then tested the copy three times before it shipped.
How people who are not builders group the decisions of building a house, so the information architecture matched their mental model, not the manual's.
Competing versions of the onboarding copy, measured on whether people started and kept going.
Watching real people follow the flow after the copy was fine-tuned on what the earlier rounds surfaced.
what I addressed, and what I did not
A facilitator's voice, formal and warm.
Written for the formal "dumneavoastră": accessible, respectful, empathetic, empowering. A knowledgeable facilitator, not a manual, because trust is what gets a nervous first-time builder to the next step.
Phased e-learning, with a low price anchor.
A phased structure and a small starting price lower the barrier to beginning. One decision at a time, from finding land to moving in.
Progressive disclosure on every long list.
A long factor list stays scannable: the essentials show, the rest opens on demand. The reader is never handed the whole manual at once.
Information scent, so the next step is always visible.
Labels that signal where a path leads, with the next phase visible and the later ones clearly still ahead. You always know where you are in the build.
Choosing the site supervisor and the tradespeople, left open.
The onboarding mapped the partners, the institutions, the key people and the requirements. Choosing the site supervisor and the tradespeople stayed a project in development.
turning engineering data into a home
The same requirement, two ways. Drag the slider to turn the engineering source into the copy that shipped.
onboarding, one clear step at a time
Screens reconstructed from the original 2016 Berlin project. Phased structure, a facilitator's voice, and progressive disclosure on every long list.
Onboarding. Phased structure and a low price anchor lower the barrier to starting.
Tone of voice. Rigid engineering data rewritten as clear, reassuring guidance.
- Sunlight and orientation
- Your way of life
- Distance from family and friends
- Closeness to your workplace
- Distance from pollution
Progressive disclosure. A long factor list stays scannable; the rest opens on demand.
what the onboarding carried
The onboarding carried people who had never read a construction document through a full build, one clear step at a time.
The product reached two million users and won the 2017 Innovation Award in Bucharest.
what I took from it, and what I'd redo
Less e-learning, more doing. Task and to-do lists tied to each step, with "want to find out more" explanations only where the reader feels the need for them.
Short videos. I would rebuild the content as short videos, and skip the general parts.