YAYgent
Mobile app helping connect home buyers with their perfect realtor.
Project type
Individual School Project
Deliverables
Mobile App Mockups
Prototype
Tools
Figma
Role
Product Designer
OVERVIEW
The Problem
Buying a house is stressful, especially for first time home buyers. Between the huge financial ramifications, the changing market, and the fact that you're making a (pretty permanent) choice of where you’ll be spending your time, it’s a BIG life event.
Add to that, the toughest housing market in history for buyers.
The Challenge
While there may not be a way to change the realities of the housing market, I set out to find a way to make the process less stressful.
How might we make the home buying process less stressful for home buyers?
RESEARCH
Interviews
With my secondary research in hand, I drafted a screener survey and sent it out to 20 people and was able to select 5 users that fit my target audience for more in depth interviews.
30 to 40 years old
Purchasing a home currently or very recently purchased a home
First home for their situation (first ever, first with a partner, or first in an unfamiliar area)
Synthesizing User Interviews
Affinity diagraming helped me synthesize the data from my interviews.
Surprisingly, most of my interviewees had mainly positive things to say about their home buying process.
The stressful things that happened seemed less important now that they were under contract or moved into their homes
I know this isn’t the case for everyone, so I was left scratching my head a little about what my next steps would be.
What is the Homebuyer’s Journey?
I decided to make a journey map to give myself a visual of what the home buying process looked like for my interviewees. I wanted to see what parts where the most or least stressful and (more importantly) how that stress was relieved.
The more complicated version ↓
Insights
This map proved very helpful in finding an underlying theme to my users’ success.
Throughout the whole process it wasn’t family or friends that offered support
A professional and supportive Realtor helped make the experience positive
Most people only spoke with ONE agent before starting their search
Personas
From my research and information from the National Association of Realtors, I decided to focus on some of the most common home buyers:
Married couples (61% of recent home buyers) and single females (17%).
People moving to a new city vs. staying in the same area
Happy Husband
Moving to a new city with his wife and kids and hasn’t purchased a home in nearly a decade.
Worried about...
Moving to an unfamiliar location, where he doesn’t have a personal network to rely on
Needs help learn about the area to find the right place to purchase
Feels like a first time buyer because of the changing market
Staying on budget
Independent Lady
First time home buyer, looking to stay in the same area she currently live. First among her friends to purchase.
Worried about...
She can’t afford to buy where she currently rents, so needs to learn about safe areas within her budget
Doesn’t know all the steps involved in buying a home, is worried she’s missing important information
Doing it on her own and needs support
Reframing the Design Question
My findings from the user interviews, affinity diagraming and journey mapping led me to narrow my final design question:
How might we help users find the right match when choosing a realtor?
PRODUCT STRUCTURE
Ideation
While brainstorming ideas to solve this problem, I thought of a few ideas, including an agent review site (that wasn’t owned by a real estate company like Zillow), or a site that connects agents to potential clients through mutual contacts. But the idea that was most exciting and answered the problem in the most complete way was this:
A dating app, but for home buyers to find a realtor best suited to them.
Realtor profiles for buyers to swipe through and chat with agents you find promising
Puts the buyer (or seller) in charge of contact
Maybe some guided questions to help folks know what to ask
User Flow
I knew that the onboarding of new users was going to be a focus of the design process. As with most online dating sites it would include building a profile in order to be matched with a realtor in the area best suited to the home buyer. So that’s where I started.
DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Early Sketches
My early sketches gave me an idea of how things would be laid out, including an initial launch screen, profile building questions, and the final list of potential real estate agent matches.
I moved quickly into wireframing as I worked on nailing down exactly what I wanted to ask homebuyers and realtors. It was a balance asking enough questions to get a good match, but not so many that users would be put off by the process.
I also took this time to make sure that how I thought the app should work was actually possible from a development point of view. As I was working with two distinct users (home buyers and Realtors) I made sure that the sign up screens would lead them to the correct user flow easily.
Visual Design
For the YAYgent style guide I tried to keep the colors bright and cheery, but still professional. The logo is based on a simplified house with a heart in, meant to symbolize not just find a home, but find a home you love. The yellow brings some whimsy to the branding, while the navy keeps things more grounded and professional.
High Fidelity Mockups
USER TESTING
User Tests
I had 6 testers create a profile as a first time user, being careful to have a mixture of buyers and Realtors.
I had a few goals during my testing:
Did users understand the profile building process?
Did they feel like they were beings asked the right questions to find a realtor?
Insights & Iteration
The profile building process is pretty linear but I was able to gain insight by having the testers talk through their process. They were overall very positive but they also gave me some clear insight into issues that needed fixing.
Issue 1: Why does that agent show up first?
Users wanted to know why the agents show up in the order they did. Users didn’t inherently trust the matches to be based on compatibility and assumed that the most prominent agents just showed up first because they paid a premium.
Issue 2: How do these Questions help me find an agent?
We had just asked buyers about their house goals, not about themselves... how were they supposed to be matched on personality if we didn’t ask them about their personality?
Issue 3: Why do I even need to answer these questions?
Users were confused about why they need to tell an app about themselves, why couldn’t they just scroll through realtor profiles and choose themselves?
The Change
I added a screen at the beginning of the sign in process that explained what the app was, and why we were asking questions
Rinse, Repeat
Excited about these changes, I did another round of usability testing. Once again I had a mixture of Realtors and home buyers and once again they were overall very positive about the app... but they had some great insight on how to make it better.
REFLECTIONS
Future Steps
My second round of usability testing gave me great next steps. The main issues that people focused on were:
Users are worried about their information being shared with Realtors without their explicit consent. Nobody likes being bombarded with unsolicited messages!
Users are still confused about why we want to know about them. My added launch screen wasn’t clear enough and was too easy skip right by.
Improve the Launch Screen
Add visual tutorial about YAYgent before the sign-in process begins
Show users the app is meant to connect you with a realtor based on personality and location
Show that the buyer is in control, an agent won’t have your contact information unless you reach out first.
Lessons Learned
This was my first deep dive into the design thinking process and I learned a lot. Through the research and initial interviewing steps I felt like I had a clear picture in my mind about what my app needed to be and look like. The usability tests presented an exciting challenge though. It was really interesting seeing what I designed through other peoples eyes as they went through the prototype. Getting real time feedback on what worked and what didn’t yielded some surprising insights for me. Once the little complaints and road blocks were out of the way people were able to focus on the larger picture issues in the app.