Understanding ‘who’ we are designing for
Designing Housing for Real Estate Agents —
In an ever-urbanising India, house-hunting is an arduous task. The seeker embarks on this journey with a lot of aspirations, dreams and loaded with expectations. Not being able to find almost exactly what one is looking for can be very frustrating. Over and above that, one has to bear the brunt of false promises, rude shocks, and much more during home search.
In present day India, a real estate agent is an integral part of this process. Often the real estate agent may be the only person who knows about an available property and the necessary legal requirements. And more often than not, unfortunately, this interaction of the seeker with the agents is not the most pleasant one.
The main reason for this is agent’s inability to demonstrate the expected professionalism. Secondly, the local brokers work through a network, many a times without having any direct contact with the house owner. This leads to confusion amongst the broker community, and to incomplete knowledge about properties. Also, as they tend to deal with multiple properties and clients at the same time, they miss out communicating the finer details of the property to potential customers.
At Housing.com, we believe that by partnering with, and equipping the real estate agents with the right technology tools, we can improve the quality of service they can provide their clients, which would effectively improve the overall experience of house hunting, and result in faster deal closures.
I am part of the UX design and research team at Housing.com (along with Raviteja and Akanksha), working on the product Housing for Agents. We are looking to identify the problems and opportunities here, and to build a product that addresses these effectively, and to be widely adopted by the Indian real estate agents. Needless to say, this means that the product has to be, and also seem relevant to them.
Housing for Agents essentially has three functions,
- A smart diary — that helps the agent maintain and organise their business contacts and property inventory.
- Agent network — that helps the agent grow their business by participating in a mutually collaborative network of agents, thereby helping them find verified properties and requirements matching their’s.
- Listing and managing properties on Housing.com — assists the agent through the process of listing their inventory on Housing.com and get leads from Housing’s millions of users.
About 6 months back, we began defining the contours of the product by trying to understand the people we were designing for, their activities and approach to day-to-day business. We soon realised that it was also important to understand the aesthetics and ‘language’ of the target audience. The Indian real estate agent is a complex personality, and the business is significantly influenced by his motivations and anxieties. Our design had to respond to these.
Some of common personality traits that were considered in the design PS: These are generic and may apply to most, but not all real estate agents. The business is changing and evolving and there are certainly some exceptions.
1. “My clients are my business and no one else’s”
For a real estate agent, his leads and inventory data is his most prized possession. In India, since barrier to entry for a real estate agent is extremely low, the space is highly competitive. The intense competition leads not just to a tendency to close deals at any cost, but also high degree of insecurity about their data of leads and inventory. In light of this, we realised that our communication in the app when we ask the agent to share his property inventory and requirements in the agent network is critical.
We started the exercise with Option A and realised that an agent would never be comfortable ‘sharing’ any of his client’s data. But we weren’t really sharing any private information, so in Option B we told him exactly that. But the UT revealed that this wasn’t working very well either. Switching the toggle shares the agent’s client requirements in the network, but what it also does is allows the agent to contact other agents who have properties. We decided to focus our communication on the benefits and inform the agent only the first time that we were not messing around with his confidential data came up with Option C, which worked pretty well.
2. “If it means more mullah, I’ll do it!”
It took few longish interviews/conversations as well as some failed experiments to realise that the only way we can convince the agent to adopt a particular feature or a product was to communicate and convince him that it would mean more business. Pitching the right feature at the right time in the agent-product engagement lifecycle was the key here.
One of the business goals of the product was to also generate revenues by selling housing Ad products like Locality expert. This ad product helps Agents generate leads in their area of operation. We decided to not just add the option to buy the product in the menu as in Screen A, but use the empty state of the leads list screen to make a pitch.
3. “I don’t need complex technology — my diary is good enough”
Most brokers in India own and use smart phones, but only a few make the most of existing tools to their benefit. Most brokers are not tech-savvy and complex interactions and interfaces can confuse and intimidate them. In order to ensure wide adoption of the product, we had to make sure that every interaction was easy to comprehend, and the agent had instant answers to the what’s, why’s and how’s.
This is an on-going process, and while some metrics indicate that we seem to be on the right track, there is definitely a lot more that can be improved. And it is these finer details that can make a world of a difference to the product and it’s perception. Designing for an audience that is not exactly the mainstream tech-savvy and confident user is challenging, but also interesting. The exercise reinforced my belief that solutions that are inspired by the person you are designing for are far better adopted than the ones set on features and requirements based on what technology can do.
