We did all the user research… and failed!
How user research, if not initiated at the right phase can have lesser impact than its actual potential
You would be lucky if you are working as a UX designer for an extremely user focused company. One who tracks and analyses data continuously and emphasises a lot on continuous user exposure to identify the gaps at an early stage. Where product roadmaps is an outcome of the findings from the user research and business strategy. I can consider myself one of those lucky UX folks.
Being a part of a team (ravi teja and Manasi Kothari) building an extremely interesting product for a tricky+complex user is fun and challenging at the same time. We designed a mobile product for Indian real estate brokers called ‘Housing for Agents’.
The main goal of Housing is to provide a smooth and hassle-free experience to Indian home seekers in their search. There are multiple directions we can take to move closer to this goal, one of them being supply of properties on the platform. And that’s where ‘Housing for Agents’ fits in. What it should do for the business?
- Increase fresh supply on Housing: To get new properties listed by the agents which eventually get available to the end consumers.
- Improve adoption: Get more #real estate agents to use this product and spread a word around in their community. Sort of have a ‘network effect’.
What follows is a 6 months journey of how we integrated user research with the product design cycle at various stages, course corrections along the way and where it eventually lead us.
Inception of the product
This was the first time when the business team had a discussion with the product, development and UX (us). It was a week long session for discussing the product direction, ideas, possible features and tentative user flows to get a rough dev estimate. The business team had spoken to a large number of real estate agents (~100s) beforehand to understand their behaviour and identify gaps that can be bridged through our product.
Key observations from their initial interactions:
- The agents use a diary to manage all their clients whenever they get leads from any source
- Apart from online platforms and word of mouth, one of the main source of leads/properties for them was through their known agent network
Other observations:
- Agents tend to forget their available inventory (which they get direct or through other agents) when a lead comes to them
- They get many calls from leads through the online portals, which is hard to manage
We had decent user information at our disposal to kick start the product discussions. Designing an engaging, simple and useful product for the agents was a challenge ahead of us.
Product Ideation
Ideation and brainstorming phase is one hell of an exciting phase for any new product. The excitement and fun is directly proportional to the complexity of the user+problems we are designing for. Everyone is brimming with new ideas and enthusiasm. Its important at this stage to keep the focus on the user’s needs and review every idea proposition in that light. Most of us had never interacted with any user till now, hence had to rely on the analysis shared by the business team. We discussed multiple ideas and one of those made the cut, based on everyone’s opinion.
The idea- ‘To build a smart agent diary’, a real life derivation of broker’s diary which he currently uses to manage his clients and inventory. A diary which helps the agents to work in a smart, efficient and professional manner. We discussed features like
- Easy requirement/inventory addition
- Setting reminders for important meetings/calls
- Saving their data on cloud
- Intelligent property matching with lead’s requirements
- Easy sharing of properties with the leads, etc.
- The agents could also broadcast their inventory/requirements stored in their smart diary on Housing or with other agents in the community to further get more leads and hence more business.
At the end of this phase it was clear that our direct focus was on getting an agent organised in his day-to-day business and then on helping him get more business through the agent network/Housing.
Our disconnect with the process so far…
However, being a part of the UX team we felt a big disconnect here. We couldn’t empathise with the users since we weren’t a part of the initial research conducted by the business team. Frankly there were quite some loopholes in the initial research which made it less reliable for us.
- We didn’t know what questions were asked (Only good questions can lead to reliable insights)
- No transcripts/recordings
- Lesser clarity on the agents profiles who were interviewed
- All agents interviewed belonged to a single city (Mumbai)
- And knew many ‘whats’, but not that all the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’, which forms the crux of any good research
We had 2–3 weeks to come up with the initial designs and we didn’t know enough about our users. Hence, we proposed a quick 2 weeks contextual inquiry to bridge the gaps existing in the previous research. Surprisingly, it didn’t take much of an effort to get everyone onboard for this.
UX researches, insights and strategic changes
Phase I: Contextual Inquiry
Our first research was organised in a jiffy due to the limited time in hand. This was conducted with 24 brokers across three cities. The respondents covered a wide spectrum of real estate agents like people dealing in only rent vs. buy, varied experience in the industry, income group, usage of online real estate portals, etc. This was a very interesting research purely because of our complex target user. We got to know a great deal about the real estate market, how different kinds of agents operate, what are their general concerns and how they individually run their business. Will be sharing finer details about this research and the outcomes in another article.
Few key insights which I would like to highlight here:
- A broker held his diary information extremely confidential which he would only share with his trustworthy group. The main reason for this is a major feeling of distrust prevailing within the broker community due to incidents of client poaching.
- Their past client data is very important to them and they would never want to loose it at any cost! They used their old client data for re-targeting, online marketing and sometimes just to keep in touch.
- Not every lead who contacts them is genuine. They had a knack of understanding who genuine leads were and hence would save only their information.
- Considerable part of their day involved searching for an inventory for a demand at hand or leads for an available property. They used closed WhatsApp/Google groups and online platforms for sourcing leads as well as properties. However, groups tend to get noisy and hence its difficult to find relevant information.
The above insights were extremely crucial to the adoption of the diary concept. We would be expecting the brokers to feed in their ‘confidential’ information into a ‘Housing’ product (brand trust will be crucial here) without the fear of ever loosing their data. Another important thing to consider was that most of our users were not extremely tech-savvy and would not prefer to use digital products until its highly beneficial for them.
We took these insights as challenges and tried to resolve them through design and product.
Product strategy based on the user research
- Emphasis on product communication which imparts a feeling of trust and security. Simplicity of language was essential considering our target group.
- Making sure that the sensitive information is always marked as ‘private’
- Auto-data backup feature was prioritized
- Build an intelligent network which only notifies the brokers when there is a matching property/requirement posted by someone
To facilitate diary adoption
- Simplification of the requirement/property addition process and treating confidential information tactfully
- After-call popup (Truecaller style), so that its easier for the agents to add their leads in the app as soon as they speak to them
Until now we all were not able to answer a lingering question:
Why would a broker use our smart diary instead of using his own? Are the smart features like setting reminders, communication and sharing inventory with leads, listing on Housing, etc incentive enough?
Phase II: Controlled Release Research
Apparently NOT! Wasn’t too late when we got an answer to our question.
We did a controlled release of the product with 50 brokers across 5 cities to test out our hypothesis and product usage. The product wasn’t complete at this stage, but enough to get an early understanding. Did contextual interviews+UT with 20 of them and survey with all 50.
We saw that the agents were not feeding their lead and property data into the app. Inspite of having some well designed probes to do so (through our after-call popup)
- Our organising features of adding reminders, sharing properties, marking leads as important, viewing lead activity wasn’t compelling enough.
- Big concern of their data being leaked
- Unsure of whether their data will be saved in case of accidental loss
- After-call popup (truecaller style) was intrusive and irritated many
It was evident that the brokers were not engaging much with the product since it didn’t solve a big real life problem for them. Our data and past researches has helped us conclude the following-
- Low diary adoption for non-housing leads/properties- They strongly associate the product with Housing and don’t see a big reason to add their other leads and properties here.
- Agent network is not grabbing eyeballs- Being a secondary focus for the product from the start, agent network has not been able to drive the metrics significantly due to its low visibility in the product
- Lowest engagement on organising features- Features like reminders, marking leads as important/closed/inactive didn’t quite make an impact and are not used. Well everyone likes to be a little disorganised I believe!
We didn’t give up just yet. Still did a few product changes for the love of ‘our’ diary concept ;)
- Did an interactive on-boarding to educate brokers about the benefits even before they start using the product
- Quick-tagging of leads, owners and agents from phone contacts to ease the contacts addition
- Making our after-call pop-up less intrusive by not showing it for stored contacts
- Smart end of the day notifications to re-engage users
There have been small lifts in the various metrics due to these changes, however nothing has caused a substantial jump.
Time to unlearn, take a blank canvas and start afresh
Finally we are at a stage to ‘rethink’ our product strategy. We just had another round of an inception phase a week back and things now look in a much better shape. Some would say that the hard work was lost. I would say, it has left us with huge learnings.
- UX Research has its place at the business strategy level even before people start thinking about the product.
- Never start product discussions with ideas. People love ideas and solutions but its paramount to keep our focus on the user needs and problems.
- It’s never too late to do a course corrections. UX researchers/designer should reveal the hard truths and ask hard questions early on to the business and product.
- Listen to your gut-feeling!
Moreover all the research till now has helped us in understanding the nuances of the real estate segment and how agents operate here. And needless to say it has made us all more empathetic towards them. That surely comes out in that way we think about the product interactions, flows and communications. We are currently working on the new product concepts and there will be prominent changes visible in the entire product design. Planning to launch the next version very soon!
There is nothing wrong with failing. Accept it, learn and move on to build better products :)
