HomeVisit is a platform to help real estate agents and brokerages market their properties and purchase media like photos and videos
The Problem
The existing platform was a 20-year-old legacy application which made it difficult to scale. The platform was also tailored to a specific demographic and region that didn’t consider nuances in the real estate market in new regions they wanted to enter. The last problem we faced was that the current platform relied too heavily on customer service intervention which created a bottle at the CSR team and their bandwidth.
Our Solutions
From a technical side, the whole front-end would be rewritten in a modern stack. The backend was completely refactored to support the new front-end as well as the legacy system at the same time, it would also have to support new features being proposed in the redesign.
On the design end, there were no legacy assets to draw from, the screens would have to be redesigned from scratch. We also created a full component guide, similar to a design system, to help scale the product. The component guide also helped speed up work and quickly solution out new features and related apps. The design system also helped us make the product region-agnostic by creating common reusable components with a focus on UX writing to create a tone that made sense nationwide.
We also introduced new features that directly addressed some of the current common interventions the CSR team was making. These ranged from small things like adding visual help and walkthrough sections, to more complex things like automating the allocation of photographers.
User Testing
We didn’t want to only make the product look better, but we wanted it to be more useful for its users. During our design sprints, we conducted user interviews and did observational testing to validate our thinking. We leveraged our clients existing userbase, some of whom had been using the product for years, to test prototypes of new features or existing features that we wanted to completely overhaul.
Working with the customer service team
We made the decision early on to make key members of the CSR team, the people who talk to customers every day, part of our design process. Not only were they stakeholders providing feedback but they were directly involved in our process. Helping us whiteboard, user test, and QA.
Design and Engineering Collaboration
With a backend refactor and a total frontend re-write, it was important that the product and engineering teams were constantly aligned. As we came up with new features or alterations to existing data structures, it was important that the backend and frontend teams were not only aware but could provide feedback. In many cases they an idea that came out of a design sprint could be further improved with some insight from the dev team.
A Suite of Products
While the main product is the platform for real-estate agents, we also redesigned HomeVisit’s customer service dashboard and introduced a new dashboard for their fleet of photographers. This new dashboard took an immense load off of the CSR team who had been manually maintaining schedules and photographer profiles. Our component guide also made it fast and efficient to create new platforms that tied together visually but could also be extended to serve it’s own specific needs.
End Results
What we delivered was a completely redesigned, reengineered suite of products to support the HomeVisit team and customers. Because HomeVisit had a large, existing, userbase already we were conscious that even though we were making large changes to the platform some users may have been using for over a decade, we maintained the essence of the service. This helped transition old users while looking ahead to new markets and new users.
