Home Design Guild
Web App Design & Development Company in Memphis, TN.
How Marlin Melendez Worked to Help Built the Home Design Guild Matching Platform.
Founder Jackie Paulsen brought the vision and a deep read on what designers and homeowners each need. I was her design and product partner, shaping it together from wireframes to prototype to a shipped React platform.
- Role
- Creative Director
- Scope
- Product · UX/UI · Dev Direction
- Platform
- React Web App + Site
- Year
- 2025-Present
A guild needs the right pairings.
Homeowners rarely struggle to find a designer. They struggle to find the right one, someone whose taste, process, and budget actually fit. Home Design Guild needed to turn that gut-feel decision into something measurable, delightful, and self-serve. The catch: it couldn't just be a directory. It had to feel like a product.
I didn't invent Home Design Guild. I helped shape it. Jackie knew the designers and the homeowners; my job was to turn that knowledge, through constant back-and-forth, into a product people could actually use.
Three hats, one accountable owner.
Creative direction here meant partnership, not solo authorship. Working side by side with founder Jackie Paulsen, I translated our conversations into product decisions, designed the experience, and stayed accountable for what the engineering team shipped.
Shaped it together
Turned back-and-forth with Jackie into a prioritized roadmap and clear specs the team could build against.
- Co-defined scope & priorities
- Designer & homeowner needs
- Requirements & acceptance criteria
Designed the experience
Owned the journey from information architecture to high-fidelity UI and a reusable design system.
- IA
- flows & wireframes
- High-fidelity UI design
- Design system & brand tokens
Drove the build
Directed the developers building the React apps, ran design QA, and made the ship decisions.
- Engineering direction
- Design QA & reviews
- Release & ship calls
One platform, five features working as one
Quiz, profile, bio, files, matches, each solved a distinct problem, yet they had to feel like a single product. Making five moving parts read as one experience was the design job.
The Personality Quiz
The signal everything is built on.
Powered by ColorWorks, the quiz maps each homeowner and designer to a working-personality type, the four-color system that drives every match downstream. The hard part was UX, not psychology: a personality test has to feel light and rewarding, never clinical. I designed a flow people actually finish, so the data feeding the match stays rich.
Matching Profile
Preferences, captured without the fatigue.
The Matching Profile gathers the preferences, style, and priorities that span every project, personality, a visual design-style quiz, and a ranked list of what matters most in a partner. Two calls Jackie and I made together shaped it: let people complete it before signing up, via a guest-ID flow so they feel the value before converting, and move project-specific questions into their own space so this stayed about the person. I kept cutting and resequencing until it felt purposeful instead of endless.
Designer / Homeowner Bio
The face each side falls for.
The Bio is the public profile the other side actually sees, the card a homeowner Loves, Likes, or passes on, and the one a designer is judged by. I designed a single presentation layer that flatters both audiences from the same underlying data, plus a "preview my profile" view so users always know exactly how they come across before they go live.
Designer Files
A new revenue line for designers.
Designer Files lets designers package and sell their design work through the platform on a profit-share basis, turning finished projects into recurring income and giving the membership real pull. I designed the upload-to-storefront flow so listing a file feels as simple as saving one, because that's what makes designers actually use it.
Matches
Where the score becomes a decision.
Matches is the payoff: the SmartGuild compatibility score surfaced as a ranked, browsable set of real people, not a number buried in a report. I designed the Save / Pass / Love interactions so picking a match feels intuitive and a little delightful. This is the moment the entire platform exists to deliver, so it had to be the most considered screen of all.
One brand, applied with discipline.
Here's the system in production, the Smart-Guild matching page. Navy, teal, and magenta over a warm cream canvas, set in Playfair Display and DM Sans, with tokens defined once and reused everywhere. That discipline is what lets the quiz, profiles, bios, files, and matches all feel like one product.
From conversation to code.
Every feature started as a conversation with Jackie about what designers and homeowners actually needed, then moved, through tight iteration, all the way to shipped software.
Discovery
Back-and-forth with the founder on designer and homeowner needs.
Wireframe
Translate the ideas into structure and turn fuzzy into testable.
Prototype
Make it tangible, pressure-test the flow, refine together.
Build
Direct the dev team, unblock decisions, keep scope honest.
Ship
Design QA, release, and watch how real users behave.
Final Results
Image 1
Image 1
From a sentence to software.
Home Design Guild went live as a coherent platform, quiz, profile, bios, files, and matches working as one. Built shoulder to shoulder with the founder: her expertise in the field, my design and delivery, nothing lost in translation between them.
Have a web app idea that needs to get built?
I work best alongside founders who know their world. You bring the expertise; I'll partner with you to design it, direct the build, and get it shipped.
