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Buyer Folio’s Entrance to the
Mobile Real Estate Market
Empowering Middle Class Families with Data and Technology to Unlock Home Ownership
May 2022
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PROJECT OVERVIEW:
The scope of work took place in a 3 week sprint that involved BuyerFolio stakeholders, 8 users and 4 UX designers. The team of 4 UX designers (generalists) played multiple roles in research, design and prototyping.
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MY ROLE:
UI Designer, UX Designer, UX Researcher
DURATION:
3 Week Sprint
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TOOLS:
Figma, Figjam and Canva
Overview
Mission: To Empower Middle Class Families with Data and Technology to Unlock Home Ownership.
Team project where myself and three others worked with the Buyer Folio team to create a mobile app prototype that allows users to search for a home or condo; contact an agent, get financing, place a bid on the property and win it!
The goal of the project was to research any pain points users could have in accessing the mobile app and gather data on the user’s experience searching for properties. Determine the critical features to prioritize for the next iteration of the product, define the MVP and setup.
Buyer Folio At A Glance
Prototype
Research
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Research began with competitive analysis as I looked into the 3 most popular residential real estate brokerage applications that focused on finding your dream home. Zillow, Redfin and Opendoor are all direct competitors however, while all apps gave priority to a search focus, they didn’t offer property bidding and document uploading which are 2 key features in the BuyerFolio app.
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
On the comparative side: Uber, Ebay Motors, and Allstate are apps that revolved around user interaction and communication in their respected spaces. Although not real estate applications, they still offered searching, gamification and other features that BuyerFolio is targeting. These features are: live chat, financial and payment information, user sharing, saving searches, and search history.
RESEARCH METHODS
As we continued our research methods, we met with BuyerFolio stakeholders to discuss and understand the scope of the project, their mission, where they are headed and the foundation of their ultimate goal. We conducted interviews with 8 initial candidates with questions revolving around our assumptions and original hypothesis. The interview questions were broken down into 4 different categories: Onboarding, Data visualization, Data Privacy, and Personalization tracking the users home buying process.
That brought us to our results where we gathered our insights and initial takeaways. Taking our findings from the user interviews we began synthesising our responses with affinity mapping. Users had multiple likes and dislikes and we ultimately found 13 major categories, but focused primarily on reoccurring themes around: automation, customization, sharing, personalization, data privacy, and brand trust.
Synthesize
PERSONA
As we synthesized our data we built out our persona that was inspired by our findings from user research.
Barbara is an accountant who is a go-getter searching for her first home along with her husband Ryan. Barbara needs a way to find a trusted real estate agent and complete the entire home buying process in one mobile app.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
First-time home buyers currently have to use multiple apps to keep track of their home buying process. Barbara needs a way to find a trusted real estate agent and complete the entire home buying process in one mobile app.
HOW MIGHT WE
How might we position the app to be a resource that allows for Barbara and Ryan to have one place where they can communicate and collaborate on their home buying process?
How might we help Barbara have multiple ways to customize and refine her search experience?
How might we visually present the home buying process end-to-end for Barbara to make the best possible option?
SOLUTION
We believe that by creating a mobile application where a user can complete all of their home buying needs in one place, we will help users heuristically through the home-buying process and eliminate frustrations. We will see this is true when there is an increased amount of people closing deals within the app.
USER FLOW
Before we began our design phase we mapped out the journey of a user with 2 tasks with a step by step flow of how they would navigate through the onboarding process and find a home listing and share it with Ryan.
Design
SKETCHES
To begin our design phase we sketched out our ideas and decided to focus on the user dashboard with event logging because it provides an easy to use and clearly laid out main screen for the users so they don’t get overwhelmed. We also focused on a user profile with onboarding activities that would help the user go through the process in completing a questionnaire. Doing this would help effectively communicate the information with BuyerFolio's algorithms and help them learn more about the user while providing a better user experience.
WIREFRAMES
After sketching out the original design we moved to wire-framing out a mid-fi prototype for usability testing. Here is where we would get a first look at a users interaction with our solution.
USABILITY TESTING ROUND 1
The Scenario: Your name is Barbara and you are looking to connect to a real estate agent via the Buyerfolio app. You're looking for a large single family home within your budget of $500K and share your findings with your partner, Ryan.
Task 1: Create an account and navigate through the onboarding process.
The Scenario: You just finished the onboarding process for the BuyerFolio app, and are ready to get started. Please search and explore the listings on the app.
Task 2: Find a property listing and save it to your profile.
The Scenario: Now that you have selected a home on the app, you really want to share the listing with a real estate agent.
Task 3: Contact your real estate agent and share the property listing with them.
QUALITATIVE: LIKES & DISLIKES
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Liked how filters feature pulled up, and was not a drop down menu.
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Liked that all buttons were intuitive.
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Liked the set up phone # to verify your account.
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Didn’t like the amount of screens for account creation.
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Didn’t like that I’m being pushed to be prequalified through the app.
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Not being able to get to the info that I want, like just searching for a house.
DESIGN SYSTEMS
After the first round of testing was completed we decided to move forward and bring our mid-fi prototype to the next level and made the adjustments there so we could use a hi-fi version for a second round of testing.
Our design system incorporated purple themes and we used Open Sans, Montserrat and Roboto for typography with iconography to compliment BuyerFolio's logo and simplistic feel.
Iterate
ITERATION
Our iteration from mid-fi to hi-fi included features in both the Onboarding and the Data Sharing process:
ONBOARDING
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Users can see how far along they are in the onboarding process.
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Data sharing preferences, sync devices, contact support, etc.
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Users can now search for homes by drawing on the city map to define a search area.
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Each home listing has a confidence score highlighted.
Onboarding
Process
Data
Sharing
Draw
Feature
Confidence
Score
DATA SHARING
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Users can "Like" a home listing.
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Home listings can be posted using the in app chat feature.
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Users can reach out to a realtor and schedule a viewing.
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Users can reach out to Buyerfolio support for a range of help from finding a realtor or help with financing.
Likes
Home Listings
Chat
Feature
Viewing
Scheduling
BuyerFolio
Support
USABILITY TESTING ROUND 2
The Scenario: Your name is Barbara and you are looking to connect to a real estate agent via the Buyerfolio app. You're looking for a large single family home with a 4 bed 4 bath within your budget of $660k to share your findings with your connected agent and husband, Ryan.
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Task 1: Create an account, verify it with your phone and complete pre qualification questionnaires.
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Task 2: Filter your search according to price, bed and bath.
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Task 3: Find a property listing, look through property information amenities and save it.
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Task 4: Share listing with Ryan and schedule a tour.
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The Goal: Users will be able to complete the app onboarding process, find a home within their confidence range, share the listing with their co buyer, and schedule a tour within 5 minutes or less with no more than 5 misclicks.
QUALITATIVE: LIKES & DISLIKES
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I like the confidence score but, I wish there was a more descriptive definition and consistent measurement throughout.
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Loved the map search along with the ability to draw an area to search
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Liked having the option to skip the login process.
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Didn’t like that the heart icon was difficult to see along with the share icon.
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Didn’t like that the colors of schedule tour blends in with background.
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Very confused once they reached the search page.
Likes
Chat
Feature
Viewing
Scheduling
UI DESIGN / FINAL ITERATION
Our final iteration featured adding a Make an Offer and Schedule Tour buttons to the home listing. We included the ability for users to add a listing to their Folio; which is the saved listings or search history. Lastly we added a visual queue to property listings that have tours setup.
Next Steps
NEXT STEPS
Our next steps we came up with would be to develop some gamification functionality where the app can reward its users for their progress and completing tasks. Secondly, additional integrations that would allow lenders the ability to reference BuyerFolio's data base to better care for their users. Another feature would be to gain brand loyalty by expanding on the iconography and design systems. Lastly, would be to create a beta version to collect extensive user feedback and analyze the user engagement with the product and the market.
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