OVERVIEW

Real Estate IQ provides a suite of tools for real estate investors. The co-founders validated market and user needs through a proof of concept and needed an updated design in order to spread to reach new markets.

As the UX Lead, I evangelized UX and standardized processes to incorporate UX in development and marketing efforts. In addition, I created a hiring process and organizational plan to scale UX as the company grows.

• Employer: Real Estate IQ

• Team: CEO, co-founder, designers, developers, intern

• Timeline: 2014 - Present

• Methods & Deliverables: Flows, Wireframes, Stakeholder Interviews, Proto-personas

• Tools: Axure, Photoshop, Zeplin

Progression of UX Maturity

Stage 1: Exploring UX. Due to limited funding and technical constraints, I was unable to propose a redesign of the proof of concept. However, I was able to make improvements on the proof of concept by properly aligning and simplifying the number of form fields.

Stage 2: Emerging UX. The company experienced exponential growth, which allowed the company to update its systems to a modern codebase and hire a full-time designer. I worked with the designer to redesign the entire interface and implement responsive design. Since the designer was not familiar with UX architecture, I worked with stakeholders to create flows and wireframes, which helped the designer creating the mockups.

Previously, the company prioritized the need to improve the user interface and thought UX research was expensive. We had an intern interested in user research so I worked with her to interview our stakeholders and create proto-personas of our customers. The co-founders found so much value in the personas that immediately used them with their sales and marketing teams so they can empathize and cater to the needs of our customers.

Stage 3: Committed to UX. The company has become a market leader and needs to hire more staff to keep up with the growing number of users. I created a UX organization plan that identified roles and a phased approach for the future UX organization. As we are hiring an additional UX staff, I worked with Human Resources with job descriptions and a streamlined interview process to ensure we hire the appropriate UX staff.

Result

Release into production. We made the initial release of the redesigned interface available in April 2019. Customers have commented on how easy and fun it was to use the new version.

Lessons Learned. 

• Work closely with stakeholders and development team to ensure everyone is aligned on the proposed solution.

• Push back on stakeholder requests based on assumptions and ensure future improvements are based on research and data from real customers.

Please contact me if you’re interested in additional details about my work.

current work