The product
Best Pick Reports helps homeowners find local home-service contractors. Its annual guide and online directory are built around independent customer satisfaction research, license and insurance verification, and annual requalification.
I was the sole designer and engineer on the platform rebuild, taking ownership from the user experience through implementation and deployment.
The challenge
The existing application was built on .NET and MSSQL. Moving it to a modern framework required understanding the data and business logic behind the directory, alongside the experience homeowners needed.
The work spanned three connected concerns:
- A large directory. Search and location logic sit on top of substantial contractor and geographic data.
- An established product. The rebuild had to account for the existing platform’s information and business rules.
- A complete implementation. I owned design, development, and database architecture together.
Designing for the homeowner
The directory has a practical job: help someone find an appropriate contractor in the place they live. I designed around that journey, from location and service selection to the information that helps someone evaluate a business.
The visual experience and the underlying data model needed to support the same decisions. Keeping design and engineering together let me work through those constraints as one product problem.
Rebuilding the platform
I rebuilt the experience in Nuxt and Vue and deployed it on AWS with autoscaling infrastructure. The work included frontend implementation, database architecture, and the location-driven behavior behind contractor discovery.
This was an end-to-end modernization of a working business platform. The responsibility extended beyond delivering a set of new screens to building and deploying the system behind them.
What this project demonstrates
Best Pick Reports shows the range of my ownership on a substantial existing product: user experience, interface design, application engineering, data architecture, and deployment. It also connects my long-standing product-design practice to the systems work I do today.