Jobber
2025
Quote options & Pricebook
Letting Jobber customers present good, better, best options on a quote, built on a pricing system that keeps quoting simple.
Overview
The challenge
Quoting is where service providers win or lose the job but Jobber made it hard in two connected ways. Providers could not present choices to a client and they could not build real pricing in the first place. For complex trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing and landscaping, price scales with complexity and customization, so offering good, better and best options is how they close and upsell. Jobber gave them no real way to do it. 93% of complex providers needed to offer options, yet 68% fought the tool with workarounds like optional line items or sending multiple quotes, and 25% went outside Jobber to Canva, PDFs or gave up on the strategy altogether. One provider was spending close to two hours building a single tiered quote, another eighteen minutes rebuilding it in Canva.
Underneath that was a deeper problem: it was nearly impossible to price work inside Jobber at all. Providers calculated costs in spreadsheets and pasted results back in, which broke profitability tracking downstream. So the work split into two connected threads: Quote Options, presenting choice on the quote and Pricebook, the pricing system that feeds it.
My role
Owning it end to end
Sole designer on Quote Options, owning it end to end: research, information architecture, interaction design and validation, partnering with my PM. The pricing foundation work I framed alongside it, the building blocks behind every quote, was elevated to a Staff-level design initiative.
Research
Sizing the need, then pressure-testing the design
I worked in two research passes. To frame the opportunity, we paired qualitative interviews with a quantitative market survey that used MaxDiff to rank which quoting features providers valued most and a Van Westendorp price-sensitivity model to understand willingness to pay. To validate the design, I ran moderated think-aloud usability sessions with complex-trade providers, walking them through building a real tiered quote in a prototype.
What we learned
Providers do not think in "groups" and "comparisons"
Their natural move is to build a line item first, then turn it into an option. The early design fought that and it cost us.
Options are a sales tool, not a feature
As one provider put it, a single price is not an option, it is an ultimatum. Choice is what makes a client comfortable enough to buy.
The workarounds were expensive
One provider described copying a line item, re-entering the details and deleting the original just to mark something optional, which doubled his input time.
The core idea
The two threads resolve into one principle. Pricebook is where complexity lives: every offering is modeled as a Service (a unit of work with its real cost structure), a Package (a bundle of services), or an Option (a client choice, either pick-one good, better, best or pick-any add-ons). Quoting then stays fast and lightweight because it is just applying those building blocks and presenting them clearly to the client.
Tracing a single line item from price list to quote to client selection to job, so pricing stays consistent end to end.
Design decisions and trade-offs
Matching how providers actually quote
Entry points that match the real workflow: Instead of forcing one path, I let providers convert any line item into an option and added a clear create comparison action, so they could start wherever felt natural. This directly answered the mental-model mismatch the research exposed.
A visual hierarchy you cannot misread: Groups and comparisons had looked alike and pick-one vs optional cues were buried. I strengthened the borders, moved headers above the line items, surfaced the selection controls in build mode and indented items inside a group. The result in testing was zero mis-clicks and instant recognition of a tier set versus a pick-one.
Enforce the choice on the client side: In the client view, a comparison requires the client to actively select an option, which removes the back and forth and makes the decision explicit.
Scope to the common case first: V1 focused on the most common options, product and material choices and simple services, and deliberately deferred complex service tiers, mobile and PDF, so it could ship and start learning rather than wait on the full system.
The finished quote the client receives: options to compare, pick one, one clear total
Testing
The moderated prototype sessions were where the design earned its shape. They surfaced the build-then-convert mental model and the confusion between option types, and I reworked the flow and hierarchy in response. The refined design tested cleanly, with providers recognizing and completing tiered quotes on their own.
Results
Shipped to learn and a foundation that outgrew the project
Quote Options shipped to a limited alpha, framed as a learning release rather than a metrics claim so the team could watch real providers use it before a wider rollout. The bigger outcome was Pricebook. I defined the Service, Package and Option building blocks that sit behind every quote and designed the Pricebook experience where providers create and manage them, shown here. That model became the foundation for how Jobber will price work and it was elevated to a Staff-level initiative.
Adding a service to the Pricebook, where each item holds its own cost, markup and price so it is ready to drop into any quote
