Arriving at a solution
A design, then silence
Before Design Hub, kitchen designs were shown once, in person — then emailed as a static image inside a quote packet. Once the customer left, there was no way to revisit the design or give feedback. For a purchase as considered as a kitchen remodel, that's exactly the window where momentum is lost.
Lowe's Project Dashboard is where customers and designers plan a project together — product preferences, design inspiration, and progress all live there, and it's the one shared space both sides return to. Critically, it's also the customer's main way to stay engaged with their project in the gaps between appointments and final completion. It tracked all of that already, but had no space for the design itself. The business identified the gap; I owned the solution, partnering with the LMS team and the team behind MRV Projects (Lowe's internal project management tool) to build it a home across all three surfaces.
Losing momentum after the appointment
- No space to stay engaged. A static email attachment gave customers nothing to return to or ask questions about.
- No formal way to manage design assets. Store visits during LMS research showed designers relied on an ad hoc process.
- A fragmented project experience. Customers had a dashboard for their project, but design — the most emotional part of a remodel — lived outside it.
Building on what LMS already taught us
Rather than a dedicated study, Design Hub leaned on LMS store-visit research plus stakeholder input — which had already surfaced that designers managed assets informally, with no control over what customers saw. Design Hub needed to solve both sides: formal asset management for designers, and a real review space for customers.
