homegenius Real Estate

Claim a Home

What is homegenius Real Estate?

The homegenius platform is a real estate search tool that puts home buying, selling and owning tools in customers’ hands within a digital experience.

Introduction

Claiming a home allows users to edit any home facts or upload new photos of their home in order to get a more accurate evaluation of their property. Every property gets an valuation of their home which is called the geniusprice. After a user claims a home they get to see a mygeniusprice which takes into account everything used to calculate the geniusprice plus any changes made to the home facts or added imagery. A new feature we want to add to the claim home process is giving users the ability to select from a list of comparables that will contribute to the mygeniusprice valuation.

Defining the Problem

Feature Enhancements:

• Give users the ability to select comparables to help refine their mygeniusprice. Need to ensure the process doesn’t feel long or confusing.

• Make it more obvious that a home is claimed. Think of ways to make claiming a home more interesting for the user. What is the difference between a claimed home and the default public view property details page?

• Continue to educate the user on the differences between geniusprice and mygeniusprice.

Design Improvements: Visual consistency/branding.

Design for all Viewports: New pricing section must work across all devices.

Understanding our Users

The primary users are individuals who own a home and are interested in learning more about the current valuation of their home or are users who do not own a home and are interested in the our owner tools.

Early or alternate ideation

Competitive Research: looked into other real estate search tools.

Iterations: Worked on several iterations exploring ways to add the select comparables step, editing steps in the future, and creating an “owner view” of some sort where they can see all of the changes they made.

Prototype and Usertest: Put together a prototype in figma and tested with internal users and users on usertesting.com to see how individuals felt about the number of steps and if anything was confusing.

My role

At homegenius real estate I am the lead designer for the “evaluate” section of the product which encompasses the user experience after a user has searched for a property.

• I worked closely with the product owner to understand project requirements.

• Conducted competitor and design research.

• Participated in design workshops with other designers at homegenius in order to find the best solution.

• Designed low-fidelity designs and did internal critiques with the product owner, UX Director, and other designers who work at homegenius.

• Put together a prototype that tested with internal employess and testers from usertesting.com.

• Set up design files to hand off to dev. I laid out the designs across multiple viewports along with a document showing all of the states for the new pricing component.

• After designs were handed off, I attended backlog refinement meetings each week where we reviewed the designs with the dev teams and BA’s. In these meetings I was able to answer any questions regarding the designs and functionality.

• As designs were getting developed I was available to support the QA team in their review process.

Next steps and learnings

Reviews have been mostly positive. During our initial user test with a prototype everyone was able to complete all steps with ease and did not feel that it was too long or tedious. Some minor feedback received:

• Confusion around how to toggle between the public view and the claimed view. We have iterated on this since and found a better solution.