Overview

In 2016, Ten-X homes wanted to develop a new strategy to tap into the 1.25 trillion dollar residential real estate market. I was part of an ambitious project to launch and grow a new app that would dominate a highly contested domain.

My Role

• I led contextual interviews, research synthesis, journey mapping, cross-functional brainstorming sessions, concept synthesis, concept prototyping, concept testing, wireframing and prototyping two of the four features, and the visual design style guide for the product launch.
• I contributed to product strategy, stakeholder interviews, user funnel modeling, onboarding a new product and design team,
• I worked with a team of executive stakeholders, product managers, user researchers, content strategists, engineers, and QA.
• Post launch, I led the improvement of key performances metrics that affected the bottom line, improving conversion by over 100%. I also contributed to the research which led our product strategy roadmap. Finally, I prototyped and tested a new feature that would help improve our bottom line: a novel way for real estate agents and home buyers to collaborate, leading to a more efficient home buying process.

Case Study

Table of contents

• Market Opportunity
• Contextual Discovery
• Reframing Opportunities
• Collaborative Design Workshops
• Concept Development
• The Birth of Xoey
• Developing a Business Model

• Defining our User Lifecycle Funnel
• Executing the Vision
• Visual Design
• Launch
• Optimizing Conversion
• Driving the Roadmap
• Lessons Learned

Market Opportunity

Xoey began as a three month design research project. Hot off the launch of the Ten-X homes platform, my job was to help Ten-X identify market opportunities and establish a new desirable value proposition that could lead to a profitable business model.

Residential real estate is a 1.3 trillion dollar market. It’s heavily saturated with companies and competitors trying to enter and control the market. It’s also a heavily lobbied industry that antagonizes drastic changes to the status quo. Our goal was to create a foothold for Ten-X to enter this lucrative market.

Contextual Discovery

I represented Product Design in a cross-functional team with members from Customer Experience, Product Strategy, and User Research. We began by interviewing stakeholders from the business organization to understand their goals and aspirations for the Homes organization. Out of these interviews came a hypothesis, that the bottom 80% of agents will want to work with us, because they have the most to gain.

But none of us were agents. So in order to validate that hypothesis, we sought to learn directly from agents themselves. Observing them do their work and interviewing them along the way. We conducted contextual interviews with 16 agents, specifically chosen for their extreme user profiles, across Orange County, Los Angeles, and Dallas. We invited other team members along to learn from the interviews in order to provide a new perspective to any existing beliefs they had, create a stronger sense of common ground to create buy-in, and engage the broader team in the design thinking process, a new way of solving problems at Ten-X.

By putting ourselves in the shoes of the agent, we could empathize with the struggles and pain they faced in their work. We better understood why real estate professionals have such a high turnover rate, how their incentives were misaligned with their clients, and why our hypothesis might have been wrong.

Reframing Opportunities

From the research, a few overarching themes emerged. We identified a divide between consumers and agents. Consumers are unprepared and overwhelmed when buying a home, which leads to frustration and regret. Agents wants prepared consumers from sources where incentives are aligned, not pay for leads. Moving forward, Ten-X should help consumers get ready for Real Estate and match them to the real estate agent that will closely support their needs.

Collaborative Design Workshops

I strongly believe in collaboratively problem solving. Together, we bring many different perspectives and ideas on how to solve a problem, ultimately creating a better solution.

For Xoey, I led 6 different collaborative design workshops. We included everyone in the process, from VPs to Jrs; Product, development, design, strategy, management, QA, everyone. Each session voted on two of our ten “How might we” statements to focus on during the workshop. These sessions laid the groundwork for conceptualizing the Xoey app. We used divergent thinking to come up with as many solutions as possible, building off each other’s ideas.

Concept Development

We aggregated all the of the ideas into 13 different concepts. From there, I created storyboards and mockups of each to present to the business organization and collect feedback from both consumers and real estate agents. We evaluated concepts on how desirable they were, how viable we believed the business model could be, and how feasible they would be to implement.

The Birth of Xoey

And so began codename Xoey (named after my friend’s dog. A codename that eventually stuck!) I continued to build out low-fidelity concepts and storyboards to better visualize our value propositions. Product design and development is an endless cycle of build and test, and here I had quickly put together some testable concepts. We were looking for that last bit of confidence before dedicating an entire team of resources to the project.

We used the outcome of the value proposition tests to validate and help prioritize our effort in building out the application. Four of the seven features received enough positive feedback to be prioritized in our core MVP, two concepts would become fast followers, and the third was a cool idea that didn't receive as much praise as we had hoped for, so we decided to wait until the future provided us with further data before eventually continuing with that concept.

Developing a Business Model

As I developed the concepts, I also help build our business model in paralel. The team used the lean canvas to explore and validate our business model for Xoey, proviing it to be a better bet than the other concepts we had presented.

Defining our User Lifecycle Funnel

I collaborated with business leaders to help define metric goals and our user lifecylce funnel. For our first quarter, we wanted to focus on proving out the idea: are people actually interested in our product? Our first quarter metrics focused separate user segments. The first was on acquiring, engaging, and creating recurring behavior with whom we called "B and C leads," or, home buyers who were 3 to 12 months away from purchasing a home. These were home buyers who would require nurturing and re-engagement as we grew them into more profitable leads. Then, for our A leads, buyers who were ready and willing to buy very soon, we focused on conversion metrics: could we get these buyers to engage with our realtors.

Executing the Vision

For launch, I focused on designing two of the four core features: Home Recommendations and Agent Match.

Quantitative research says that 56% of buyers say the hardest step of buying a home is finding the right property. From our qualitative research, we believe that buyers have unrealistic expectations of what they can afford, don’t realize they will need to compromise, and don’t understand which factors they’re willing to compromise on.

Given this: How might we help home buyers find the right home and set expectations

I led another brainstorming session with the product manager, content strategist, user researcher, and developers to come up with possible solutions for this feature.

• How might we help first time home buyers understand their home preferences and top 3 priorities?
• How might we help first time home buyers realize how much home they can realistically afford with their budget?

From there, I built out the concepts and laid out potential user flows.

Concepts would be tested with actual users to further increase confidence that we are building the idea right, and again validating this is the right idea. In lieu of time, I conducted guerilla usability testing with a convenience sample to validate baseline usability.

Visual Design

I took a rare opportunity to design and develop the visual style of the app, working cross-functionally with marketing to ensure brand consistency, the other designer to ensure compatibility, and engineering to validate feasibility and help convert the style guide into a UI toolkit.

Launch

We successfully launched Xoey in June of 2017. I contributed to the over-arching strategy and vision of the product, designed two of the four launch features, and created the visual style guide for the product.

Optimizing Conversion

The second feature I worked on was our agent match. This feature was directly tied to our business model, referring home buyers with real estate agents and sharing a piece of the comission.

When we first built the agent match, we had technical constraints that required users to create an account and provide a phone number before request real estate agents. We believed this would negatively affect the conversion rate.

Later, we tested our hypothesis. We believed that removing the requirement to provide a phone number from agent match would improve the conversion rate, ultimately increasing the number of referrals.

I supported the release of an A/B test that would validate our hypothesis. Two weeks and 2400 users later, I was surprised to learn that requiring phone number actually improved our KPIs!

Our quantitative A/B test told us “what,” and so I followed up with qualitative interviews to learn why. Fewer people are willing to provide their phone number, but those that do are more serious and more likely to engage. Providing their phone number also afforded a different medium of communication outside of our app: conventional text messaging, which some consumers preferred due to the familiarity of interaction.

Driving the Roadmap

As the project continued, I contributed to both short term optimizations and longer term strategy. I helped organize internal feedback and facilitate user interviews which, synthesized with analytics metrics, help prioritize short and long term strategy and ideation. I continued to lead cross-functional ideation and planning for short term optimizations to our agent tools, presenting feedback to executive leadership. I contributed to roadmap development and identifying market opportunities that drive Ten-X closer to its business goals. Ask me about "H.A.T." or "Pick-up Lines."