How might we help users accomplish their goals efficiently while providing a seamless experience?
A New York-based real estate firm where we designed solutions for Closing Administrators and Managers as our primary users.
There is no standardised way to track Closing Administrator's actions towards progressing real estate transactions. There are delays in processing buyer and seller accounts because their existing tool and communication system isn't efficient enough - requiring a lot of manual effort. With no cadence of tasks in place, there is no way to ensure if the users are performing correct tasks timely and consistently.
Understanding user needs
Identifying opportunities
Creating solutions and
user journeys
Testing, refining, and
final delivery
Validating solutions with
real users
Closing administrators
We conducted user interviews as a part of discovery and research and documented insights and feedback using Empathy maps.
Biweekly
Using empathy maps helped us to understand user role and their responsibilities, uncover user needs and behaviours. It helped to externalise knowledge about users to create a shared understanding of user needs within team.
During each user interview session, we categorised insights into actions, opportunities, pain points and quotes.
The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) helped us visualize and prioritize the best paths to achieve our desired outcomes, ensuring the team focused on the most impactful opportunities and solutions.
By mapping out each step in the The Opportunity Solution Tree, we were able to align stakeholders, focus on high-impact initiatives, and ensure our efforts were directly tied to achieving our desired business and user outcomes.
Design flows are diagrams that display the complete path a user takes when using a feature.
We did this by laying out the user's movement through the feature, mapping out possible steps the user takes—from entry point right through to the final interaction.
We conducted user feedback sessions on a bi-weekly basis where we documented and categorised user insights into:
This process helped us to:
Using this product, the number of accounts that users processed increased from 30- 35 accounts/day to 45-50 accounts/day. Thus, the efficiency of the closing administrators improved by 42%, resulting to a significant boost in the company revenue.
efficiency increase
Daily accounts processed per user
Net increase in daily account processing per user
Continuous discovery helps to identify challenges sooner than later.
Iterative and Lean UX approach helps to get user feedback as early in the process as possible.
Using opportunity solution tree helped to identify all the possible problem areas for each user, decipher insights, prioritise user problems and opportunity spaces.
Involving engineers and tech leads in the design process helped to pinpoint technical limitations, dive deeper into the feature design and keep the team up to date with the design evolution.
Weekly sessions with users to test design concepts helped to identify problems/potential problems early on - thus, saving time and effort.
Raising potential risks/challenges early in the process helps to find ways to mitigate them and maintain transparency with the client.
Customer is not always right, don't hesitate to ask questions.
High communication makes a healthy team.
Let's work together.