Real Estate
The new CRM allows brokers to effectively connect client profiles with the properties they manage. This new concept significantly reduces time to market from 4 hours to just a few minutes by offering a streamlined mobile feature.
Role:
UX Research, Testing, Optimising Journey
Date:
Out 2021 - Fev 2022
Continuous Discovery
Measuring Success
The missing link: Aligning business challenges with a great end-user experience.
This project was an exciting professional journey, where I applied continuous discovery under the guidance of Product Coach Petra Willy. One key lesson I learned is that in a B2B product, the end user isn’t the sole factor in determining success. While creating a valuable and desirable product is important, it's equally crucial to align business strategy with the design and development process. Although the application was decommissioned in early 2022, this case study showcases the process and the accomplishments of our work.
Continuous Discovery
This project provided an exciting professional experience, allowing me to apply continuous discovery while being guided by the Product Coach Petra Willy. However, I learned that having a valuable and desirable product alone isn't enough to ensure success. It's crucial for business strategy to be closely integrated with the design and development process. Although the application was decommissioned in early 2022, this case study highlights the process and achievements of our work.
Mitigating Risks
In a collaborative session involving the product owner, developers, and designers, our team identified key uncertainties and assumptions about the product. We focused on the most significant risks and areas of ambiguity, which primarily revolved around user knowledge. From these insights, we crafted a research plan tailored to address these critical questions.
The process began with generating hypotheses across the product team, followed by the development of research questions linked to each hypothesis. The resulting chart visually maps out the various levels of research, making it easy to see how different topics and methods are interconnected, while also ensuring transparency in our approach.
My role and Challenge
Responsible for successfully including rental features on the CRM so that agents could also provide leasing services. Even though rental is only providing a small share of the whole revenue, we want to make sure this new CRM provides high-quality standards to final clients and, at the same time, empowers real estate agents to be more effective in closing leasing deals.
As a second Product Designer on the team, I was mainly involved in discovery and research to capture similarities and - most importantly the differences - between rental and sales working modes. After gathering all the research assets, I translated the findings to product features, and together with the product team, we decided how to measure the outcomes.
Learnings from Research
RUN FAST
We discovered that the rental division operates at a much faster pace compared to sales. Agents manage a larger number of leads and listings, aiming for a few closings per month. Contrary to our initial assumption, rentals require continuous, intense effort, with agents frequently conducting showings, client contacts, and evaluations.
EFFICIENCY
Although the overall process and main activities are the same as in the sales division, they need more closings on rental to get a decent income. The current slow CRM is an absolute blocker: only available on the browser (IE), lacks filters, search demand is not reliable, etc. An additional constraint is waiting for the photographers, which can take 2- 5 days.
Measuring Success
When dealing with a complex system, I wanted to make sure the product team and other stakeholders have the same understanding and are aligned about how to measure performance. To reach a sensible metric here was used the HEART framework.
The first sensible metric that was chosen, was the time to market. This means how much time is needed from the acquisition until publishing the new property in the big online portals. This is specifically important for the rental domain because it has a faster life cycle.
