The App You Need for Investing in Real Estate Without Headache
The Purple Door application is an investor-friendly application is an app that provides all the necessary information for investing in glance an also connects users to the agents who have a great portfolio at closing great deals for investors, who is competent at their job, has time to focus on your needs and can act very quickly.
Role
-
UX/UI Designer
-
Visual Designer
Team
-
Product Designer
-
Programmers
-
Content Strategist
-
Executive Director
Design Goals
​​
-
Creating an extensible design system shared with all the teams
-
Discover the main pain point of our target market and test possible solutions with prototyping and testing
My Approach
"Design with no research has no value and is nothing more than an opinion. In order to solve any problem, you need to understand and define that problem. Once you understand you can ideate by considering potential constraints. The next step is to test your design, reiterate and get into the feedback loop." _Hoda Pedram
​
Persona
​Alex Darley
​
32 years old male
Salary: 150k-170k
Single
Lives in San Francisco
Programmer
​Goals​
​
Finding the best deals for investment without spending a lot of time
​
Working with an agent who is an expert at investing properties
​
Having access to the necessary investing information for each house in the market
​Pain Points​
​
Lack of time ​
​
Not finding the proper agent & lack of trust
​
Difficulty to have access to the necessary investing information
Rapid Prototyping and User Interviews to
Validate Pain Points
​​
-
How you find a good case for investment in real estate?
-
What other real estate apps do you use and which one is your favorite?
-
What is the most frustrating thing about buying real estate for the purpose of investment?
-
How do you define success in a good real estate app?
-
How do you start your search?
-
How do you feel about this design?
-
Where would you click on this design, and what do you expect to happen?
 |  |  |
|---|
What Matters the Most for our users
Finding good income-generating cases.
What matters for most of them is these key information for each case:
​
1.Price
2.Annual property taxes
3. Property insurance,
4.Average rent ( for that location )
​
​
*To assess whether the rental property has good prospects for generating income, use the 1% rule, which says that the gross monthly income on the property should be at least 1% of the price of the property to sufficiently cover potential rental property expenses.
According to the 1% rule, the property in the example above has good income-generating prospects because it generates a gross monthly income of $1,000, or exactly 1% of the property price.
​
​
​
Ideate ( Design for Impact )
From the "Lack of time to find important information " pain point, I have started formulating a problem statement. I started this exercise by HMW (How might we) method to spark ideas that focus on human-centered design.
With the user interviews in mind, I brainstormed the elements to create a simple and clear experience to give all the information our users need in a glance.
These factors will make the "purple Door" differentiate from its competitors.
Sketching Ideas
Before I spend any time on high fidelity design, I started by doing solution sketches, each would have pros and cons based on our limitations.
Idea 01
Add a Diagram to Evaluate Profitability
​
-
Once they enter the market page, they can compare homes based on their growth income.
-
This diagram shows the correlation between the potential expenses and potential income.
Idea 02
Add key information for investors in a glance
​​
-
1.Price
-
2.Annual property taxes
-
3. Property insurance,
-
4.Average rent ( for that location )
Idea 03
​
Personalized onboarding
​
-
Getting to know the user needs and values during the on-boarding
-
Show relevant deals to the user
Idea 04
Virtual Assistant
​
-
User can chat with the virtual assistant bot and even use voice chat to communicate
-
The bot will help you conduct a shopping list and will memorize all your shopping habits
Mid-fidality based on the chosen scenario
Real estate agent portfolio
​
-
User can see and compare agent' experiences and portfolios
-
She can subscribe to get an alert whenever the agent has a new listing
Teamwork
Wireframe
The two solution sketches that I further explored were the "Corrollation diagram" and "Show key information in a glance"
The Problem
​
The other apps/sites in the market don't give investors enough information to make a wise decision in real estate investment which leads to lack of clarity and confusion for investors
​
​
​​
​​
Solution
​
-
Designing a layout that focuses on all the four key information for a good investment.
-
Adding a diagram that helps the user to see and compare growth incomes.
​
​
​​
​​
Prototyping and Testing
​
Perhaps as a designer one of the hardest parts of our job is not to fall in love with our solutions and keep on testing.
My process for this project was to get the prototype in front of new fresh eyes and get some feedback.
Information in a Glance
-
User can choose her main factors
-
She can see all the information in a glance inding the right property based on its effective cost and income.
Connecting to an Agent
-
After the user finds the deals that she is interested she can go to the agent profile and see his profile.
Design Results
I have also set up some indicators of success to understand how I can measure success, some examples are:
​
-
The user is clear on what the app does and how the navigation works
-
After the seeing agent's page, the user is eager to follow
-
After seeing the property's net expenses/income, the user is eager to contact the agent
Here are the top questions that I asked 20 users:
​
-
If you could describe what you see, how would you describe it?
-
18/20 users could easily describe what they were seeing without my help.
-
2/20 users had a hard time finding the search bar
-
-
How do you feel about seeing net expenses/income for each property?
-
17/20 users feel that it helps them to make better decisions.
-
-
Are you going to sign up after this experience?
-
17/20 users indicated that they are excited to use the product.
-
Based on the early User Testing results, users were excited about adding the net income/expenses bar and seeing each agent's portfolios. These features associated with a more efficient buying experience. Users were also ready to sign up and try the product.
Art Direction
Overall View of Design
In this section, you can view the entire process of finding the right property based on it's effective cost and income and how it lands into an agent's page.
Retrospective
Each design exercise is a new learning experience for me. Staying open-minded to criticism from other designers and users is essential to growing as a designer.
To wrap this up I would like to summarize what would I do differently if I had more time and how this design can be improved:
​​
-
More user testing and usability hub testing.
-
Setting up A/B testing to heat test some concepts (Really curious to have some data about showing all expenses/income data in one page vs focusing on at a time to see which one does better).
-
Exploring the investor's experience and to come up with design solutions that answer the "Lack of Trust" pain point.