Property Data Resource Mobile App Design
Background
Pricefinder is a real estate data platform that provides real estate valuation and transaction data for real estate agents, valuer, governments, property developers and investors. 90% of these users are real estate agents.
Challenges
This platform has more than ten years of history, so there are many legacy issues. For such a product that serves the professional and conservative audience, massive design changes are too risky for the brand and business.
My role in this project
As a lead product designer, I closely worked with the product manager on problem defining, conducting user research, creating hi-fi wireframes/prototypes and running usability testing.
Design strategies
to reduce risks and drive innovation
DESIGN
GOALS
DISCOVERY RESEARCH
GOALS
Mobile app
Create a new mobile app which contains core features that helps agent to get vendor leads.
Qualitative user research:
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Discover agent's existing needs and pain points.
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Understand user archetypes.
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Find out whether the mobile app is what everyone needs
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Learn about the essential features of the mobile app.
Desktop
Re-skin and improve user experience by baby steps.
Quantitative survey:
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Get user's feedback on the re-skinned design
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User survey to understand core features.
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Understand the key problems and diving deeper into qualitative research.
VALIDATION RESEARCH GOALS
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Usability testing.
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Test information architecture.
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Identify unmet user needs.
How did research insights drive the design concepts?
INSIGHT 1
From user research, we found that each real estate agency or agent has their area to work. They called it "farming area". To meet the user needs, we designed a search tool works for city farming area and suburb farming area.
Agents working in the city, the area they prospect is small with a high density of the properties.
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A location search tool works for the precise scope of searches.
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Update recent searched property sales status.
SOLUTIONS
Agents working in the suburbs have large prospect areas.
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An intuitive map assists the agent in observing the market and searching for leads.
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Update recent searched property sale/for sale price on the map pins.
INSIGHT 2
From quantitative survey results, the agent spends 50-60% of the time on mobile each day, contacting customers and investigating market.
50-60%
Time on mobile
Providing a property appraisal report for the vendor is one of the ways that the agent wins the seller's trust and gets vendor leads.
How to value the property?
Pricefinder provides an adequate source of information for the agent. From user research, we found that property prices are usually based on three main factors.
Three facts to evaluate a property
Location of the property
Property condition
Market and comparable sales
SOLUTIONS
How could we assist the agent make appraisal?
Location comparison
Suburb market data updates
Condition comparison
Qualitative research PROCESS
METHODOLOGY - Qualitative data analysing funnel
Debrief
Clustering
Mapping
Insights
Debrief
Debrief occurs after each in-depth interview. Research moderator and observers gather together. Write down the most impressive findings on the post-it notes, then share with the team. Discuss conflicting findings, which helps to avoid subjective bias.
Clustering
Review the notes and fill in the missing ones. Group related findings into thematic groups. Combine the duplicated findings.
Mapping
Through mapping, we can find out the correlation between the research findings or the thematic groups. And this association can help us discover the process, the conflicts, and the cause and result.
Insights
User insight is a deep summative discovery. Insight can be the reason and result of a finding or learning. It may also be a deep motivation or cause of surface behaviour.
PHASE 1 Discovery research
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Research goals:
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Understand the user journey, user's day-to-day tasks and current product touch points.
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Understand unmet user needs and missing opportunities.
Real estate agent user journey map
PHASE 2 Validation research
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I've created high-fidelity prototypes to have a quick usability testing,
Research goals:
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Test the new mobile app usability
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Understand what the most important features and content are.
User validation research - Content Priorisation Activities.
Discovery research - Research finding synthesis
The Impact
One month after the app was released, we did another NPS Survey. We got a lot of positive user feedback. The NPS score increased from 44 to 49.
From the IOS app store user reviews, most reviews of the new app are quite positive, excluding the reviews of the old app.
Promoters
61%.
Detractors 16%.
Passive 23%.