Role
Product Design Lead
Product Design
Digital products for real state
Alohome is transforming the way people buy new homes online. We build software that empowers residential developers to sell direct-to-consumer through online storefronts. Think: Shopify for home builders. With only 7 months in operation, during our MVP we have brought online over 450 houses and achieved significant traction. You join a small but growing remote team composed of industry experts and seasoned innovators.
The Problem
The property search and presentation process lacked efficiency and personalization, resulting in an uneven experience for users.
What are the main differences between typologies?
What are the differences from floor to floor?
How do I pick a specific apartment?
Where is a specific apartment located in the building?
Project Objectives
Facilitate interaction between developers and buyers, removing barriers and simplifying processes.
Improve efficiency in property presentation, optimizing visualization, and highlighting key features.
Increase transactions on the platform, fostering trust and active user engagement.
The Process
The process of rapid prototyping, a cornerstone in my development approach, begins with a clear definition of goals and requirements. I transform concepts into tangible prototypes using design tools and prototyping technologies through agile iterations. These prototypes undergo thorough testing to gather feedback, enabling continuous refinement and improvement of the design. This user-centered and agile approach ensures the creation of functional end products tailored to user needs.
Main learnings
The key takeaways encompass essential insights for ongoing improvement and user experience enhancement:
1. Expand Relevant Information: Users require more detailed information about departments, including location, pricing, and typology. Meeting this need will enable informed decisions and instill confidence in exploring available options.
2. Clarify Typologies: Users struggle to comprehend distinct department typologies. Addressing this challenge involves implementing a visual and textual communication strategy that effectively clarifies characteristics and differences, ensuring users have a clear and accurate understanding of their choices.
3. Enhance Map Localization: Difficulty in pinpointing departments on the map is another valuable lesson. To address this, optimizing the map functionality is critical, ensuring users can easily explore precise department locations through an intuitive navigation experience.
4. Usability Focus: These insights underscore prioritizing user usability and experience in platform design. Clear, intuitive interfaces centered on user needs will help address identified challenges and ensure a smoother, more satisfying experience.
5. Continuous Feedback Loop: These takeaways emphasize the need for ongoing user communication to gather direct feedback. Integrating user insights into design and development facilitates swift issue identification and continuous improvements that elevate the platform's quality and effectiveness.
In summary, these takeaways form a strong foundation for refining and evolving the platform, enabling continuous adaptation and improvement to meet evolving user needs.
Ideation
This wireflow ensures a smooth transition for the user from the landing page to department selection, offering essential details, filtering options, map visualization, and contact choices for a comprehensive and effective user experience.
Prototyping & Validation
Prototyping and validation constitute a pivotal phase within the development process, serving to bridge the conceptual gap with tangible representations. This stage gains its significance from the validation aspect, where real users engage with prototypes. By observing user interactions, designers glean critical insights into usability and functionality, allowing for adjustments that ensure the final product resonates with user expectations and needs. In essence, this stage validates design assumptions and fine-tunes solutions, resulting in a user-centric and effective end product.
Results and Metrics
30% increase in the time users spent on the platform was observed, indicating increased engagement.
The conversion rate from visits to transactions experienced a 25% improvement, signaling a more effective experience.
Insights
These insights provide illuminating perspectives on user experience while interacting with the platform:
1. All users perceive the process of finding a department as straightforward, indicating a positive initial impression regarding platform ease of use and navigation.
2. However, all users encountered difficulties in understanding the results screen. This highlights a gap in the clarity of information presentation or interface design at this stage of the process.
3. Another identified challenge is that all users had difficulty finding how to get a quote from the results. This suggests a potential lack of prominence or clarity in the call-to-action for obtaining detailed information about the departments.
4. Similarly, the struggle of all users to locate similar results points to an opportunity for improvement in presenting related or comparable options, possibly through more effective recommendation or categorization features.
In summary, these insights offer a profound view of strengths and areas for enhancement in the user experience on the platform. By addressing these challenges, the platform can be optimized to provide a more intuitive, functional, and satisfying user experience.
Business Impact
A 20% increase in monthly transactions demonstrated the effectiveness of the new design in conversion.
Alohome solidified its position as a leader in the property search experience, building trust within the user community.
Conclusion
The project not only succeeded in improving the user experience but also had a tangible impact on Alohome's business performance, supporting its position as an innovative and user-centric real estate platform.
Design
I lead the amazing design team, we worked on the design process of the products and features like digital showroom, marketplace, sales team tools, quote, Interactive map, payments, and design your apartment.
