Clayton My Home
Buying a manufactured home is a massive life milestone, but the digital experience often relied on insufficient legacy communication. I was brought in as a Principal Designer to lead the visual vision and product strategy for a mobile solution that provides transparency across the entire purchasing journey.
ROLE
PROBLEM
Customers faced a total lack of visibility between their initial deposit and moving in. This led to frustration and high inquiry volumes. Existing communication methods were inefficient for agents, and there was no digital framework to support homeowners with post-purchase needs like smart home technology integration.
RESULTS
Secured 100% Stakeholder Buy-in
Approval for Full-Scale Development
Closing the visibility gap
The team had already begun identifying various user struggles, but the data remained fragmented and anecdotal. Because the project was on a short timeline with no room for heavy documentation, I utilized a bottom-up approach to let a cohesive strategy emerge from this raw data. I began by laying out a sequence of user statements to build the backbone of the homebuyer journey. This helped the team visualize the big picture and identify gaps in the existing analog experience.
I then took these various user statements—representing specific desires, pain points, and conflicts—and synthesized them into a comprehensive Affinity Map. This allowed me to organize large amounts of unstructured stakeholder data and build consensus among a distracted team. Through this mapping process, we identified a critical Visibility Gap. Customers felt stuck in a "black box" after their initial deposit with no insight into the construction of their home. This lack of transparency led to status fatigue and a high volume of inquiries that created massive bottlenecks for agents.
Visualizing the ideal build
To move from abstract strategy to a funded roadmap, I created a series of iterative low-fidelity approaches to open the minds of the team. While stakeholders had an idea in their mind, they needed a visual partner to help them find that specific vision. By presenting various styles, we quickly knocked out the directions that did not resonate and found a solid grounding for the product. This rapid feedback loop allowed the team to provide direct impact on the layouts and feel true ownership of the direction.
Once we established a solid prototype, I created a high-fidelity video featuring a mobile device that narrated the various pathways for Clayton homeowners. This motion piece simplified the complex workflows into a compelling story that anyone could understand. This vision video became the ultimate tool for securing stakeholder buy-in and moving the project onto a funded, high-priority roadmap.
Promotional video for key stakeholders
Building for the human on the other side
The My Home project proved that empathetic design can bridge the gap between complex industrial processes and consumer needs. By collaborating with stakeholders to refine onboarding and post-purchase flows, we created a digital companion for the biggest purchase of a person's life. The result was a greenlit product officially funded for full-scale development and external testing that will be ready for launch in 2026.
