HireAHelper: Conversion ReDesign

HireAHelper had outgrown its own site. The platform was working, but as traffic grew so did the friction: confusing filters, a long checkout, a visual style stuck in 2017. My job was to rebuild the booking experience into something people actually wanted to use.

Over three MVPs, we untangled the funnel, modernized the look, and shipped a design system that let the team move faster without breaking the brand. The numbers followed: higher conversion, more revenue per visitor, and a smoother ride from search to checkout.

HireAHelper has been connecting people with movers across the US since 2015, one of the originals in online mover booking. After seven years of growth, the site that got them here wasn't the site that would take them further.

The challenge

Users were frustrated. Filters confused them, the checkout dragged, and the brand looked stuck a few years behind. The value prop wasn't landing either. We needed to make the whole thing feel modern, fast, and trustworthy, without losing the users we already had.

Three objectives

Pain points

Before redesigning anything, we needed to see exactly where the experience was breaking down. So we talked to people (stakeholders, customer service reps, movers, real customers) and watched how they actually used the site.

Pair that with a heuristic audit, and the patterns showed up fast.

• Checkout felt overwhelming, even for simple services.
• The visual language hadn't moved since 2017, and engagement and trust were taking the hit.
• Search felt rigid: users had almost no way to customize their criteria.
• Filters were too technical, making it hard to actually narrow things down.

01

Issue 01 · Overwhelming checkout

Even simple bookings dragged users through a heavy confirmation flow, with too many steps for the size of the job.

02

Issue 02 · Filters that fought back

Search criteria were rigid and the filters spoke ops-language, not user-language, making it hard to narrow down to the right mover.

Issue 01Issue 02

From the interviews, a clear persona emerged, and with it a real picture of where people got stuck, where they bounced, and where the experience could actually win them over.

With our own customers mapped, we looked outward, studying how the rest of the industry handled booking.

Early on, the plan was to model HAH after an e-commerce marketplace: browse, compare, book, like a vacation rental. But the deeper we went into both our competitors and our own service model, the clearer it became: our value prop didn't quite fit that shape.

Rather than rebuild everything at once, we picked our highest-traffic landing pages (the geo pages) and started testing. Each variation swapped a different version of the CTA form. A few months in, we had real data telling us which directions were working.

01

Variation 01 · Original CTA

The baseline CTA form on the geo landing pages: long, vertical, ZIP-first.

02

Variation 02 · Condensed layout

Trimmed the form to its essentials and tightened the visual hierarchy around the primary action.

Variation 03 · WinnerWinner

The variation that converted best: clearer headline, lighter form, stronger CTA, shipped to the geo pages.

Variation 01Variation 02Variation 03

• Started small, testing surgical CTA changes before reimagining anything bigger.

• The new CTAs worked, but the rest of the site still felt dated and disengaging.

By 2023, it was clear HAH wasn't just a marketplace anymore. So we leaned into that, introducing service cards on the homepage, cleaning up the marketplace UI, and shifting the primary brand color from green to blue to feel more trustworthy.

That kicked off a new step-by-step conversion funnel. We A/B tested everything to make sure conversion held steady while we evolved the experience underneath.

• Added a step to collect more context up front, so results actually matched what users needed.

• The new design performed better, but the form step was still too long.

Now we're rolling out a more detailed but intuitive booking flow, closer to what our competitors offer, but with HAH as the primary partner instead of a third-party broker. Porch handles quotes and the move itself, end-to-end.

• Rebuilt checkout from scratch: what used to be a card-details modal is now a full summary with schedule, options, and clear payment paths.

MVP2 tightened up the funnel by clarifying visual hierarchy and surfacing the move summary up front. But users still had to pick a mover themselves.

In MVP3, the funnel grew up: surfacing multiple quotes quickly and letting users customize the rest of their move, not just the mover. Personalized, but still a marketplace underneath.

The shift: less "browse a directory," more "here are the best options for you." HAH's algorithm, refined over years of customer data, does the heavy lifting on the pre-selection.

Save Quote: pick up where you left off.

Users can save a quote at any step and get it emailed back, so they can come back later without losing progress.

Browse Movers: still a marketplace, just smarter.

The marketplace is still there. The algorithm pre-selects the best mover by default, but users can swap, compare reviews, and pick a different one at any time.

After enough rounds of testing, we built a proper design system for HAH, sitting on top of Bootstrap, powered by Flowbite. It gave the team a consistent, accessible foundation, and let us ship faster without breaking the brand every other sprint.

In parallel, we revamped the landing-page layer: A/B tested the geo pages, the homepage, the service pages, anywhere conversion was at stake. (Worthy of its own case study, honestly.)

HAH keeps evolving: flows shift, layouts change, the work continues. I wrapped up at Porch in August 2025, so this case study is a snapshot of the years I was part of it.

A look back at the journey: from inheriting the green-era marketplace in 2022, through the blue-era funnel rebuild, into the quote-driven MVP3 and the design system that tied it all together.