Acting as Senior UX/UI Designer, working with a Developer and a Product Manager, I developed a self-service application to enable shared owners to buy more shares of their home through the SO Resi website – an industry first. This was carried out for MTVH, one of the county’s largest housing associations.

PROJECT DRIVERS

A number of factors brought this project into being:

• Commercial imperative; selling shares in the homes raises revenue for the housing association.
• To use Salesforce as the centre for all customer interactions across the business, promoting self-service where possible.
• Desire within the business to be digital leaders within the shared ownership/housing association market – possibly white-labelling products in the future.

PHILOSOPHY

• By taking an MVP approach, we were able to deliver value to the business with each iteration, building-out functionality as we went
• Progress was measured against key metrics – primarily the time taken for homeowners to complete the sale, and the revenue generated
• Bring the business customers with us (The Digital Team) on the journey to educate them about iterative agile development

PROCESS

Firstly, I Interviewed staff within the business to understand the internal processes involved in buying more shares of a home, and to map the customers’ journey within that. This allowed us to understand the scope of the project and to identify areas where we might be able to add value.

I then interviewed people who had bought more shares of their homes through the existing (offline) process, to learn more about their experiences, what went well and what were their pain points. This allowed us to understand some of their mental models surrounding the process and what it was that they valued.

We also interviewed customers who had not bought more shares, to discover what they understood of the offer and what they might expect.

Once the scope of the project was fully understood, we were able to plan how we would approach the project, breaking it down into key milestones.

Designs were produced in Adobe XD, to create working prototypes. Fortunately, several of the design assets from the Selling Your Home project were able to be repurposed, which reduced development time – for example, we knew that the To Do List had tested well and so we were able to use this again with confidence – though we still did usability testing.

Content design principles were applied to all content created

Usability testing was carried out for all deliverables, with real end-users.

CHALLENGES

• Existing tech infrastructure did not always integrate with Salesforce, meaning that the final solution was always as desired, thus compromising the UX. This was frustrating!
• The site is relatively low-traffic and so feedback and metrics were often slow to be obtained
• Customer Service agents often did things the old ‘manual’ way rather than referring homeowners to the new online system. This reflects the lack of integration of the Digital Team within the organisation.
• Some aspects of the sales process – such as solicitors’ transactions – were outside of the scope of the application and so were not improved. This meant that existing pain-points were not addressed.

KEY DELIVERABLES

• Informational content
• Onboarding workflow – customer tells us they want to buy more shares
• To do list
• Document upload
• Customer notifications

TOOLS

• Post-it notes
• Pen and paper to sketch ideas
• Adobe XD for final designs
• Miro to map processes and flows
• Trello
• Salesforce

EXAMPLE SCREENS

Here is a selection of interfaces from this project: