Housing for Agents

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Introduction

Any marketplace whether it is for new consumer products, used products or properties thrives on the continuous cycle of demand and supply. At Housing, our primary focus is to provide a rich and seamless experience to our buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants. We try to enrich their experiences to the best of our abilities by

- Providing verified listing to avoid expectation mismatch

- Creating a delightful and simple product to ensure that people find whatever they need in the quickest manner

- Providing subsidiary services like rental agreements, home loans, etc for hassle-free deal closures

- Aiming to provide new and fresh supply of properties in most of the localities

'Housing for Agents' was envisioned to feed fresh supply of rental and sale properties to Housing, which in turn will help them in providing a seamless experience to the end users.

Process
We had a very research driven approach towards building this product which impacted the product strategy as well as the design. UX Researches conducted at various stages of the product:
* Contextual Inquiry (During the inception phase of the product)
* Controlled release research (Interviews and survey with 50 brokers to whom the initial product was rolled out)
* Telephonic interviews
The research findings were fed into the product team and was taken as an input for building the product strategy and creating the roadmap. These findings was also taken as a foundation for our content & communication strategy and well as the overall design of the app.

Have given a brief account of my research findings in a medium article here -
https://medium.com/ux-for-india/we-did-all-the-user-research-and-failed-157807e8e216#.igvf67jmz

Contextual Inquiry with brokers across 3 major cities to identify their behavioural patterns, inhibitions and how they generally go about their business

Brainstorming session with the business, product and dev team during the inception phase of the product

Concept & Design

The product was conceptualized to have 2 main components to it:

- Agent Diary

An agent uses his diary to keep an account of all his leads, their requirements and inventory. He uses this diary for highlighting his 'hot leads' (important/urgent leads) and taking a note of when to call/meet any of them.

Housing for Agents was designed to become a 'smart agent diary' which can overcome all the existing gaps of their current diary

- Agent Networking

The real estate agents use various channels for sourcing properties/leads for a requirement in hand. Channels like online property portals, closed whatsapp groups of local agents, closed google groups, etc are used extensively to connect with other brokers having matching properties/leads and hence get more business. However, there were lot of drawbacks of such channels like

* cluttered information

* no easy way to find the desired stuff

* too many notifications for unrelated things

* unknown agents were hard to trust

We tried to solve most of these issues in networking through our product.

Design Highlights

1. After-call popup

We designed an intelligent after-call popup for probing the agents to store their leads information into their smart diary. A lot of thought had gone in designing this feature to ensure that it's less intrusive, probes at the right time and the content of the popup is easy to understand for the brokers.

Design explorations for the after-call popup widget. The key objective was to make it visually less intrusive, have an easy language for our target users and help them to take quick decision/action.

2. Product Onboarding

Considering our users' limited knowledge and experience in using digital products we redesigned our onboarding process to improve the user adoption from the first instance. The illustrations, content and flow of the onboarding was well thought to connnect with our userbase and communicate the app concept easily.

Interactive onboarding to assist first time users and help them adopt better

3. View and Sharing matching properties/requirements

We tried to remove the clutter for the brokers and enabled them to focus on ONLY the right stuff. The flow was designed to show the matching properties to the broker right after he has added a lead's requirements. It helped in

- Instantly identifying the right properties from his own as well as from the ones shared in the network.

- Share the requirement instantly in the network, if he doesn't have a matching property

Matching properties displayed to the broker soon after the requirements are added

4. Content and Communication

Communication was one of the main focus of this app due to the different target group we were focusing on. The content at various screens and flows was well thought to connect with our users. The content which was given special attention was on the onboarding flow, after-call popup, our locality expert product page (sellable product) and agent network hooks within the product.

5. Dashboard

The focus of the app was making it a 'smart diary' and hence we tried to communciate that concept through our app dashboard. The aim was to enable a broker to perform all his tasks in an efficient and easy manner. We made a task oriented page where the broker can right away focus on his main tasks for the day and add contacts or reminders instantly.

Dashboard for a regular and first time user. We tried to design the dashboard keeping the 'diray' into focus. A very task based landing page which allows he broker to focus on the key tasks of his day as well as add stuff to his smart diary.