Creating a Short List of Properties in Commercial Real Estate.

The Challenge

“As a demand side user (tenant-rep, tenant, principal, buy-side broker, etc), I want the ability to create a short list of properties, so that I can compare, analyze, tour, and discuss these properties.”

My Role

• Led user research and and feedback initiatives to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback to help inform a user-centric design.
• Created User Flows to help understand the process our users are taking and identify their goals.
• Created wireframes and prototypes to help visualize the flow and bring the designs to life.
• Collected, monitored, and distilled user feedback to continuously iterate and improve upon designs
• Collaborated with management, product, engineering, and data teams to inform design direction and make sure it aligns with business goals.
• Created beautiful, delightful, and pixel perfect visual designs for engineering handoff.

The Proposed Solution

Create an ecosystem called Saved Properties where users are able to add properties to groups and then take actions within that group.

Strategic Importance & Fit

Saved Property Groups fill strategic needs on the demand side of both sales and leasing marketplaces.

1. Demand Experience — Saved Property Groups will drive a better demand experience by enabling more efficient and effective collaboration and property selection.
2. Leads — Saved Property Groups appeal to Tenant-Rep Brokers, enabling lease demand growth in key leasing markets, driving more leads to Landlord-Rep Brokers.
3. Low End Disruption — Saved Property Groups will enable a small amount of personal branding for tenant and buyer-rep brokers, a feature that should appeal to users in the small and middle markets, where they may not have the resources to hire a full time admin or marketer to compile tour books and marketing materials for their spaces.

Business Goals

By adding to the utility of Saved Properties, we believed we could drive our demand side company KPI through higher adoption and better retention. By focusing primarily on the needs of Tenant Rep Brokers, who are the key to the demand side of the leasing marketplace, we can enable an ever-green source of tenant acquisition and activity. We also believe the same functionality that drives utility for tenant-reps will drive utility for demand users in the sales marketplace.

How Might We…

• How might we provide a place for our demand side users to “favorite” properties so that they are able to revisit those properties?
• How might we allow our users to add properties to a group so that they can organize their properties for themselves or their clients?
• How might we allow our users to perform actions on the properties in their groups to help streamline their processes?

The Process

User Interviews: Along with my product manager and two of our sales reps, we flew out to meet with some of our customers in Omaha, Nebraska. We conducted user interviews while we were there- we also conducted some remote user interviews with other tenant-rep brokers from around the United States.

Here are some of the questions that we asked:

• Walk us through your current process of trying to match a tenant with an available property or space.
• How do you currently gather properties for a client?
• What devices do you use?
• What types of software are you using?
• How do you decide how to sequence a tour of the properties?
• What part of the process is most difficult?
• What part of the process is most frustrating?
• What part of the process is most time-consuming?
• What part of the process is easiest?
• What’s most important to you in a solution to this problem?

White boarding session: In collaboration with my product manager, we sat down and did a white boarding session to help further define the problem we were trying to solve.

User Story Workflow: After white boarding, I created a user workflow to help visualize the steps that our users take from start to finish when searching for properties for themselves or their clients.

Designs: Using the Crexi design system I took the knowledge we gained from the research and started creating designs and prototypes that we could test.

Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile — Saving a Property

Some Initial Designs for Testing

We took the prototypes and did some live testing with our users and also used usertesting.com to do some unmoderated tests to get feedback and identify pain points and areas of friction.

Some Key Learnings:

• Users wanted to be able to quickly add properties to a group. They generally were searching for one client at a time so there was friction when they would go to save a property and the modal would pop up each time.
• Once users were in a group- they had a hard time finding their way back to the entire list of groups they created. Making it hard to switch between groups.
• The map was key and being able to visualize where the properties were on that map was really important (because they wanted to be able to create a tour based on location). Having a way to optimize the route for them would save them time and be very helpful.
• Once they were on the map view- they were unable to deselect a property they had saved- causing friction when they wanted to remove a property from the group.
• Users wanted to be able to vote twice. Once before they saw the properties and once after- since things could change after you saw the properties.
• Tenant Rep brokers often find properties though word of mouth that are not on Crexi. They still want to be able to add them to a group of properties so that they can share a comprehensive list in one place with their clients.

I incorporated this feedback into my designs to create a comprehensive solution that would address our users needs and goals- and then made final designs that were ready for engineering handoff!

Challenges

This was a very large project so it was met with many challenges and engineering constraints that we had to work around. One of the biggest challenges was that the lease side of our site and the sales side of our site are two separate platforms and we wanted this to be available on both sides of the platform. So we had to work very closely with engineering to come up with a plan on how best to implement this and execute this on both sides so. This product launch taught me how important quick, meaningful, open communications is cross-functionally. When you keep the lines of communication open you are able to get things done more efficiently! :)

Next Steps

Because of the nature of this feature/product we decided to release this on the lease side of the platform first. Seeing as our main business goals were (as mentioned earlier) “to focus primarily on the needs of Tenant Rep Brokers, who are the key to the demand side of the leasing marketplace, so we can enable an ever-green source of tenant acquisition and activity.”

We are going to continue to gather feedback from users and look at data to make informed decision and updates. Engineering is also going to start building this on the sales part of the platform so we have a comprehensive offering for our users.