CARRIE BENGSTON
UX DESIGN | CONTENT
Property Tech startup
The context
Our home is the single most valuable asset most of us will ever own. Yet the vast majority of Australian homes are sold using a real estate business model that's over a century old. An early-stage PropTech startup had a bold vision to disrupt the property industry and help users sell their properties peer-to-peer, online. The founders were looking for UX ideas for an app or website. They asked our team of 3 students to do user research and create a user journey map to bring their concepts to life.
“We want to empower people to sell their home”
- Startup founder
The problem
Our client was a Property Technology (PropTech) startup at the concept stage looking to disrupt the traditional real estate model of selling homes. They wanted a better understanding of their potential product’s users and their journey through the process of profiling and selling their home online. We also wanted to test one of the founders' assumptions - that homeowners, buyers and sellers have the same needs when it comes to property. And to answer a question for the startup: "How might we empower sellers to sell their own home online?".
The process
An affinity map of our interview findings drew out the pros and cons of dealing with real estate agents.
Our team analysed the client brief and identified a need for research with potential users to test the founders ideas and validate assumptions. We conducted over 30 interviews with homeowners, buyers, and sellers. Our aim was to discover their priorities, thoughts and needs as they navigated the property market. For example, sellers and buyers had quite diverse views about real estate agents based on their personal experience. But would they trust an app?
A 'good' real estate agent:
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acted as a trusted adviser during negotiations with buyers
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provided accurate, up-to-date market knowledge
A 'bad' agent:
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poorly communicated important information
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was not trustworthy, ethical or transparent
Some key takeaways gleaned from our interviews with buyers, sellers and home-owners.
Pros of agents included negotiation advice and cons included poor communication.
To better understand the business landscape, we did competitor and comparator analysis, property sector research, and interviewed SMEs, real-estate agents, about their services. They felt they offered market expertise and people skills, and went the extra mile for sellers to obtain a good price.
We used affinity mapping and empathy mapping to draw out themes from the interviews. As a team, we devised a detailed user journey map. Then, because our clients wanted to ‘empower home sellers’ and identified sellers as their key user group, we created a seller dashboard. This was designed as a digital solution to give users key data to manage their property sale. We did limited user testing but found even this was useful for educating our clients about its value and identifying changes for future designs.
Empathy mapping the heart, minds and hands of sellers.
The solution
We found homeowners, buyers and sellers do, in fact, have different needs and that the startup would benefit from understanding these. The detailed user journey map of the desired future state outlined the feelings, actions, pains and gains of a seller on the journey from app signup through to marketing their home to sale and beyond. This gave our clients insight into potential touch-points across time, and identified additional features and business opportunities.
We wanted to give the clients a glimpse of a possible User Interface (UI) for a key screen that could give users important buyer data that a good real estate agent would provide, instantly and transparently. Our seller dashboard was created from sketches done by each of us using a design studio process. Features were based on user research and included:
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a status bar showing the current stage within the overall sale process
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measures of buyer interest such as a graph and counts of profile views and likes
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a summary of offers under consideration with access to expert negotiating advice, an area of user need
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a calendar showing upcoming inspections and numbers of people attended with calendar access to set future inspections
My initial sketch of a dashboard concept as part of a design studio process.
The dashboard design brought the best ideas from our team into a hi-fidelity prototype.
We wanted to demonstrate the value of iterative design based on user feedback and so conducted usability testing of the dashboard prototype with a user who’d sold 5 properties, an experienced seller.
We learnt from user testing that:
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the status bar was completely missed by the user, so we could move it from the top to underneath the property name and test again
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the property 'likes' metric was confusing, so we might need to define it better and/or explore more meaningful ways of measuring and reporting buyer interest
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the graph of buyer interest needs to be annotated with time-specific events like asking price changes or inspections to show how they influence interest
We wanted to demonstrate the value of user research and iterative design based on feedback from testing.
Dashboard with callouts showing feedback from user testing which would inform further design iterations.
Next steps would be to conduct additional user testing (ideally with 5 users or more) of the current iteration and then iterate further based on the collected feedback. Despite the project's short duration, we made significant progress on the client's conceptual ideas, showing the value of UX approaches to research and design.
“This was much more than we expected”
- Startup founder
My role
Our team of three students - Sneha, Gabriel and I. We worked together on many of the project tasks and individually took the lead on others.
While we worked as a three-person team, I led several UX Design project tasks.
Creating a dashboard was largely my idea, based on a need to give users trust in the platform and transparent information so as to be empowered in the sale process. I was aware of the kinds of data provided by agents to vendors and inspired by 'at-a-glance' dashboards for fitness apps.
I also led analysis of real estate industry competitors and comparators and PropTech digital disruptors. And I played a big part in research and contributing to empathy maps and a seller's user journey. Several key features of my design sketches also made it into the prototype dashboard design.
I ran usability testing on the prototype, writing a testing guide, arranging and conducting testing and reporting the feedback. My fellow students deserve the credit for implementing the designs and revising them in the light of user testing and other feedback.
We were proud that our work gave the founders a much firmer footing on which to build their business and fresh new ideas for a unique peer-to-peer offering in the property tech space.
Fun home fact!
Australians have one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. Close to two-thirds of Australians are paying off a home or own their home outright.