Home shopping

How might we...

improve home shopping management tools so Home Advisors can more effectively serve their customers?

Process

This was a long project with ambiguous scope, so my PM and I invested in lots of upfront research to ensure we were building the right thing. We also set up a 2-month beta program with a small group of HAs to ensure a smooth transition.

Key activities

• Current-state user research
• Card sorting to understand user values
• Initial scoping + requirements definition
• Concept-testing mid-fi designs
• Beta group adoption + feedback collection
• Full release

Current-state research findings

Primary users

Home Advisors (HAs) are licensed real estate agents who work on the “buy side” of a transaction (aka shopping for and purchasing a home).

Differences from a traditional real estate agent

• They are pat of a larger team at Orchard; they collaborate with Listing Agents, Transaction Coordinators, Pricing, and more.
• Large pipeline of customers - HAs work with 10-20+ customers each month, so they have a lot of people to keep track of
• 70% desk-bound - HAs spend less time in the field, and are mostly working from their desktop computers

How they spend their time

• Monitoring their pipeline of customers.
• Communicating with customers about home tours and their current progress.
• Updating customer info & preferences.

Project scope + requirements

HAs were moving from Salesforce to Deal Hub, where we would need to support:

• Managing a pipeline of all home shoppers
• Viewing an activity feed of customer <> Orchard communications
• Updating information about customers & leaving notes
• Accessing customer’s saved homes & searches (via the Orchard customer dashboard)
• Viewing home tour feedback and upcoming tours
• Easily creating and checking off tasks

Most of this work was net-new functionality, but my PM and I also took the time to make strategic usability improvements to existing Deal Hub features.

Design process - Activity Feed

For each of the above feature areas, I went through a mini design cycle. See below one example of what that looked like for creating a new Activity Feed.

Step 1 - user research

• Had 1-1 conversations with ~6 users. Our goals were to:
• Evaluate how well current activity content is serving users.
• Determine what type of content and level of detail to include.
• Establish primary use cases + user groups outside HAs.

Step 2 - content mapping & prioritization

• Reflected on what we'd learned was most important from research.
• Identified potential activity types (e.g. texts, calls, system activity etc.)
• Worked with PM to determine which activity types we would include in the MVP.
• Discussed with eng to ensure we had access to all the data we wanted to display.

Step 3 - inspiration gathering

Scoured the internet for similar UI patterns to get the creative juices flowing.

Step 4 - UI exploration

• Started low-fi and worked up to high-fi.
• Experimented with different layouts, link styles, icons, imagery, etc.

Step 5 - Align with eng on final design

• Reviewed the final design with the team and answered questions.
• Documented new design system components.
• Discussed potential MVP+ fast follow features.

Final designs

We repeated a similar process for all the other features scoped in to this project. See an overview of the final designs below:

Outcome

The new dashboard + related work was rolled out smoothly & on-time. We ran a survey to understand HA satisfaction a few weeks after release, and found:

• Satisfaction with pipeline management, tasking, and communication remained flat.
• Satisfaction with managing new home closings increased (+26%).
• When asked if Deal Hub has made doing their jobs easier, 57% said yes, 29% were neutral, and 14% disagreed.