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 sell their homes through the SO Resi website – an industry first. This was carried out for MTVH, one of the county’s largest housing associations.

A key strategic project, this took over 12 months to complete.

PROJECT DRIVERS

A number of factors brought this project into being:

• Legal changes in the shared ownership industry meant that housing associations had a much-reduced amount of time to market a customer’s home before they were then able to sell on the open market – thereby depriving the housing association of income. Reducing the time to bring the property to market was therefore absolutely vital.
• Desire within the business to be digital leaders within the shared ownership/housing association market – possibly white-labelling products in the future.
• To use Salesforce as the centre for all customer interactions across the business.

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 between the customer saying they want to sell, and an offer being made on their home.
• 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 selling 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 sold 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 were able to identify whether or not these were inside the scope of control of MTVH – for example, a common complaint was the lack of communication by solicitors.

Competitor research in the private sector was carried out, including interviewing a customer of Purple Bricks online estate agents.

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.

Content design principles were applied to all content created

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

CHALLENGES

• Stakeholders had problems at first understanding the iterative approach and seeing its value. They expected an all-singing-all-dancing product release and didn’t understand why we weren’t just working towards that. Senior stakeholders are often used to digital teams just ‘doing as they are told’. This scenario was familiar to the development team who were able to educate and guide the stakeholders. Trust was key! Once initial metrics started to show we were going in the right direction, they began to have faith in the iterative agile process and saw its value.
• There was a steep learning-curve as the development team hadn’t used Salesforce before
• 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 sell their home
• To do list
• Document upload
• Review and sign off of property listing
• Customer notifications
• Arranging viewings
• Viewings feedback
• Marketing dashboard

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: