How the leading home improvement marketplace improved their user experience
By: Julia Winder
Porch, the Seattle-based company connecting homeowners with local contractors, just launched Mapbox maps and geocoding across their entire offering. Whether you’re looking from someone to mount a TV or need an estimate on a new addition, it’s now faster and easier to find the right pro to tackle your home improvement needs.
While users will see Mapbox all over the site with search boxes powered by our Geocoding API, Porch is actually using our tools to power the end-to-end experience. Their “Pros”, or contractors, can select areas they’re willing to work in on an easy-to-navigate map, giving them full control over how they spend their time. Homeowners can search for a professional close to their home, and vet them based on past projects organized by location. Internally, the Porch team relies on Mapbox maps to visualize millions of projects to better understand demand, trends, and what cities to expand service into next.
The Porch team recently completed their own significant home-improvement project: Switching from Google to Mapbox with a team of five in just 10 days. With detailed documentation and hands-on support, their scrappy and ambitious group of engineers effectively moved everything over in a two-week sprint.
“Mapbox has an incredible developer support team. They were friendly, knowledgable, and went above and beyond to make themselves available to help. The high-quality Mapbox documentation and active open source community made updating our React applications straightforward and easy.” — Alex Hogue, Senior Software Engineer
The Porch team is already starting to see returns on their switch, noting:
“We experienced performance gains out of the box when we switched to Mapbox. This is evident in the responsiveness of the WebGL map component and its ability to render large service areas without lagging.” — Alex Hogue, Senior Software Engineer
Need a better way to connect service providers with your customers? Get in touch with our experts to learn how we can help.
Julia Winder - Technical Account Manager - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Porch gets its own makeover was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.