Helping interior designers quit spreadsheets: two years designing Programa

A core part of an interior designer's process is collating every product that will go into a project. Designers call this scheduling, and they have historically done it in Excel. Programa set out to let them quit spreadsheets forever.

Over the course of two years we partnered with Programa to devise the V1 product that took them to market, and then, after a $2m raise, their V2, which addressed many of the things we had de-scoped before market validation.

Scheduling

The schedule is the spine of the product. It has to hold hundreds of line items across rooms, suppliers, lead times and revisions, and still be something a designer can hand to a client. Getting it to feel lighter than the spreadsheet it replaced, while carrying more, was most of the work.

Integrated Marketplace

Programa's long-term business strategy was tied to connecting designers directly with suppliers from inside the product. The first step towards that was the Integrated Marketplace, where designers could search products from Programa Verified brands and drop them straight into a schedule.

Moodboarding

For collecting inspiration, designers can create and share moodboards right from Programa. No more Pinterest.

Project management

We integrated a full suite of project management tools into Programa, including a project kanban board, task management and time tracking, so the schedule sits alongside the work of delivering it rather than in a separate tool.

Invoicing and business tools

The schedule already knows what was specified, at what price, for whom. Invoicing was the natural thing to build on top of it.

Brand Portal

Brands can join Programa and see a bespoke dashboard with insights into who is interacting with their products. Designers and brands can also connect with each other through this portal.

Connecting brands directly with designers

Designers and brands can connect at the click of a button for quotes. This shares the full project schedule with the brand, letting them see the exact requirements of the designer in order to deliver an accurate quote, which removes the email thread that used to sit between the two.

Ecommerce functionality

Because of the nature of Programa's brand/designer connection strategy, we built full ecommerce specification functionality right into the app: dynamic pricing, product variations and everything else you would expect of a fully fledged ecommerce platform.

Mobile companion app

Helping designers save inspiration on the go. The moment a product is worth specifying is usually not the moment you are sitting at a desk.

See the full set of screens in the Programa gallery.