Helping real-estate agents to prospect for new clients while they’re out and about.
Realtair is an end-to-end SaaS product for real-estate agents that facilitates property transactions - from prospecting through to settlement.
A company objective was to help agents to foster productivity while not at their computer through a new mobile experience.
As the UX lead, I led the discovery and design of this new product which included:
Outlining a plan for discovery and design activities
Running customer interviews and usability testing, analysis and synthesis of insights.
Facilitating workshops and co-design with stakeholders and the cross-functional team.
Framing problems through the creation of artefacts and bringing the team and stakeholders along the journey.
Working to prioritise, narrow the focus down to an achievable MVP, roadmapping future updates
Refining processes with complex user-flows, iterating on wireframes and prototypes
Stakeholder management and scheduling of regular check-ins to provide updates and gather feedback
My role
Discovery
Customer interviews
Customer interviews revealed a large part of an agent’s role is prospecting for new listings in their local area as well as selling existing listings. Current market conditions means listings are in decline so we decided to focus our efforts on helping agents garner new business first before looking at ways to support their selling activities later.
Prospecting is highly tactical and involves many layers of strategic activities designed to nurture relationships, creating a pipeline of new business. Some activities can be done from a desktop while others require the agent to get out into the community and meet people face-to-face. e.g door-knocking, appraising homes, meeting people at open homes or while grabbing a coffee at the local cafe.
The one-on-one, in-person conversation was regarded as one of the most effective ways to build trust and stronger relationships that increase the likelihood of future listings.
Opportunities
We identified several opportunities for Realtair where our current product didn’t meet our customers’ needs in this context:
The need for a more generic report that could be created containing sales information and data about a local area, street or suburb rather than only specific to an address
The need for that generic report to be easily sharable “on the spot” to anyone the agent meets rather than having to create a new report for every new contact
The need to be able to quickly capture details and notes during each interaction and easily add them to a CRM rather than waiting until they’re back at their desk
Agents want to be able to create and manage templated messages they can quickly personalise themselves as they’re sharing reports or documents on the spot
Using knowledge gleaned from interviews, we co-designed a proto-persona with the cross-functional team for a prospecting agent - building off a previous agent persona I had previously created.
After journey mapping our persona doing a typical in-person prospecting activity - door knocking on a local street, this crystallised to the team where we were going to focus our efforts first - improving the experience when agents meet a new contact for the first time and want to collect details and share a report with them.
Persona and Journey map
The agent’s door-knocking journey, culminating in a successful appraisal and a signed agency agreement.
Agent Persona
Prospecting agent proto-persona
Design
After mapping out the current process for sharing a document with a new contact in our system, it was very obvious we needed a re-think around this process to cater for this in-person context.
User flows
Current-state user-flow - share a document to a new contact - a very manual process with many steps
Future-state user-flow - share a document to a new contact
Wireframes and lo-fi prototype
Some quick wireframes helped the team visualise how this new process might come to life.
We decided to test this early concept to get confident about whether this new process of sharing documents was something customers would find value in before iterating based on the feedback.
Initial sketches
Early wireframes
Lo-fi wireframes
Lo-fi prototype - market report
Lo-fi prototype - message customisation
Lo-fi prototype - sent screen
Quick demo showing a mid-fidelity prototype I created to use for usability testing the steps an agent would follow to instantly share a presentation created in Realtair with a prospect
What we learned
Context is everything. The process of exploring how agents go about prospecting in-person helped us understand and prioritise what tools they need access to in the palm of their hand.
Once we knew what they were doing and why, it provided focus for the team and a clear understanding of why our product was not giving agents what they needed.
Through the process of testing and iterating, we arrived at a solution that was flexible enough to support all the scenarios of where an agent might meet a new contact and want to collect details and share a pre-prepared presentation with them.
Project overview
Company
Realtair
Role
UX Lead
Year
2023