Core Team

Yael Olivo - Product designer
Lubomir Varbanov - Lead Software Engineer

I ran a prioritisation workshops to define which problems we would focus on for the first release, and which would be deferred to later ones. With that in mind, we brainstormed a series of features and placed them in a cost/impact matrix to define the MVP.

Pre-pandemic remote project

The product team was based in Bulgaria, while at the time I was living in Portugal. I conducted all workshops and user interviews using Google Meet combined with Miro (virtual whiteboard) and used lookback.io to record user interviews. This not only allowed me to complete the whole project remotely but improved and sped up documentation.

Guerrilla prototype testing

I created a first mid-fidelity prototype based on the outcome of the previous workshop. However, there was no budget set aside for user testing, so I decided to offer a free day at a co-working space in exchange for one hour of usability testing. This allowed me to rapidly remove some obvious oversights in the user flows and move on to higher fidelity in a short amount of time.

Understanding users vs customer

The core feature that the product team had envisioned for the real estate portal was an AI-powered auto-recommendation feature. However, from our interview we understood that what differentiates a successful estate agent from a mediocre one is the ability to match buyers to properties. If an AI could help their clients find a match better than they can, it was unlikely to hold much appeal.

For the MVP, we decided to create a monitoring tool, which focused on reporting and showing how an agency's performance can improve over time thanks to AI. While our user remained the real estate agent, our customer became the agency owner or the resource manager.

Methods & tools

Skills / Methodologies

• User interviews

• Stakeholder interviews

• Experience mapping

• Prioritisation matrix

• UI design

• Rapid prototyping

• User testing

Tools

• Sketch

• Invision

• Zeplin

• Miro

• Lookback

Outcomes

• Delivered discovery report, high-fidelity prototype and icon set for two digital MVPs in 4 weeks

Learnings

• Often, the fastest way to make a decision on a user interface is to visualise it. One of the developers proposed a series on features for the portal dashboard, but even a low-fidelity mockup showed it would be far too complicated for a non-technical user.

• Understanding the existing digital ecosystem can help save time and prevent user frustration. For example, most estate agents already log all their activity in another software, and that log can be exported as plain text. Rather than creating a new input system for them, we focussed on visualising the raw data that was already available.

• Zooming out can help find alternative solutions. A cost/impact matrix can help prioritise features, some features, however, may seem unavoidable. For example, new leads would come from the app use, but a list of existing leads had to be imported or created into the portal. We evaluated creating a feature to import a database, but the engineering team cost estimation was too high. We decided it made more sense to import existing leads manually as part of customer service, and only when the product scaled up it would need a dedicated feature for it.