(April 2021,- February,2022)
Product Overview
Right at Home Realty Inc. (RAHR), a leading real estate company in Canada, sought to enhance its operational efficiency and agent experience by automating key administrative tasks. The project's goal was to create SaaS to streamline processes for RAHR's extensive network of agents, improving overall productivity and ease of operations.
Problem & Solution
RAHR's operations were hindered by:
- Manual, inefficient processes lead to operational errors and inefficiencies.
- The use of multiple, disparate tools, causes time management issues and a steep learning curve for agents.
Solution:
We developed an end-to-end platform that automated tasks like agent onboarding and deal processing. Additionally platform included: an academy, team management, task management, and a dashboard with analytics. This solution effectively replaced multiple existing systems with a single, efficient platform.
Challenges:
The primary challenge was integrating various existing tools into a single, streamlined platform that would be user-friendly for RAHR's diverse agent base. An additional challenge was to understand real estate market intricacies as a UX designer to build an effective solution.
Approach:
In addressing these challenges, our approach included a shift to digitally entering information to automatically prefill the majority of forms, significantly reducing the time and effort required from agents. This approach was grounded in an in-depth understanding of the real estate industry, its regulations, and the specific needs of agents.
Involved parties in product building
Design Process For Deal Processing
Initial Research and Contextual Inquiry:
To understand how real estate agents and RAHR representatives operate from start to finish, I conducted a contextual inquiry by visiting the RAHR office. I documented day-to-day operations and interviewed several individuals, which significantly helped identify areas for improvement.
Conducting Additional Interviews:
Visiting the office raised many unanswered questions and hypotheses. To dive deeper, I engaged further with agents and RAHR representatives to gather more insights into the challenges and inefficiencies within the current process..
Mapping Out Existing Processes:
Working with RAHR's deal processor, I documented and analyzed the current onboarding and deal processing workflows to establish a baseline for improvements.
Gap Analysis:
Together with the Product Manager and other designers, we identified key areas where the current flow was lacking. This included unnecessary manual data entries, redundant steps that could be automated, and bottlenecks that delayed processing times.
Designing Optimized Process Flows:
We collectively developed a new workflow that streamlined steps, reduced manual entries, and introduced automation to minimize bottlenecks and improve efficiency. The new flow was confirmed with RAHR team members.
Creating Wireframes and Prototypes:
We visualized the optimized process through wireframes and prototypes to clarify the proposed changes and their impact on the workflow. The new version was presented to RAHR stakeholders and got us lots of positive feedback.
Usability Testing:
We created a script and did moderated usability testing of the new design with real users (agents and RAHR representatives) to ensure the design was intuitive and met user needs. Findings revealed some usability issues, including the need for clearer instructions on certain automated steps and validation for data entry to prevent errors.
Collaboration and Feedback:
After addressing the issues found during usability testing, I worked closely with the RAHR team and agents to refine the design based on feedback, ensuring the final process was both efficient and helped improve company KPIs.
Documentation & Hand-Off:
I compiled detailed documentation of the new deal processing flow and handed it off to the development team for implementation, ensuring a smooth transition from design to execution.
Challenges & Conclusion
A big challenge was simplifying RAHR’s complex deal process without disrupting how agents work. We had to make sure the automation didn’t create more confusion while keeping everything user-friendly. Working with the team to align on improvements took constant communication and feedback. In the end, we created a more efficient process that was easy for agents to use, improving both workflow and overall satisfaction.
Learnings
One key learning was how valuable it is to visit the actual workplace. Seeing how agents operate day-to-day revealed issues that we wouldn't have noticed remotely. I also learned a lot about improving workflows by mapping out processes and finding small changes that made a big difference in efficiency.
Final Product
Unfortunately, I cannot showcase the full final product or attach a working prototype here. However, you can visit the RAHR website and explore the platform as an agent to see the "fruits" of our work ;)
Desktop
Mobile
