Bitprops

Bitprops mission is to make real estate investing easily accessible to the general population

ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

Working on conducting industry research, competitive analysis, user flow, journey map, wireframes and prototyping

TOOLS

 

DURATION

34 Weeks

 DISCOVERY

Understanding Real Estate Crowd Funding

 The Challenge or Problem Statement

To kickstart this project, I drew up key assumptions about the investors. This gave me a starting point which allowed me to formulate research questions to understand the following:

  • Assumption 1: The average person may not have funds for a down payment on a property

  • Assumption 2: Obtaining funding can be tough which usually result from bad credit, income to debt ratio and other factors

  • Assumption 3: Finding a property management company may be costly when investing in a property solely on your own

  • Assumption 4: If you do buy a property on your own, managing your property may be time consuming and can get costly fair quick

Potential Solutions

  • Having a platform that allows investors to pool money together to invest in a property

  • A sponsor would be needed (the person who finds good deals, and the post the property on our platform for investors to view)

  • We would integrate a rating/review system for sponsor to attract investors to invest and make them feel safe

  • This platform would give you options to diversify your portfolio as you may invest in multiple properties

User Interviews

I interviewed users to learn about the following:

  • How often do you look for good deals on houses for sale?

  • Are you looking for a short or long term property investment?

  • What other investments do they have in your portfolio?

  • What platforms do you use to look at real-estate on the market?

From the user interviews, we found that users:

  • Had email a notifications to keep them up to date on new properties and good deals in their areas of interest

  • There was a mixture some preferred short term investments of 2.5 years or under and others preferred long term investments

  • Other investments users had were stocks, crypto, 401k and bonds

  • The common platforms people look for real-estate is zillow, realtor and redfin

 DEFINITION

Summarising the UX Research into Actionable Insights

Persona Creation

From the user interviews that I conducted, there are two themes that appeared that I split into personas. The first persona focused more on investment as a younger individual. The second was more focused around targeted investing with specific goals and savings.

Although there are similarities the main difference are apparent when you compare the frustrations and the goals. It was apparent that there were separate frustrations being shared from the interviews. One which is trying to identify minimal-risk investments and the other was focused on property-based investments.

These personas form the basis for creating a product that would cater for both audiencesFrom the user interviews that I conducted, there are two themes that appeared that I split into personas. The first persona focused more on investment as a younger individual. The second was more focused around targeted investing with specific goals and savings.

Although there are similarities the main difference are apparent when you compare the frustrations and the goals. It was apparent that there were separate frustrations being shared from the interviews. One which is trying to identify minimal-risk investments and the other was focused on property-based investments.

These personas form the basis for creating a product that would cater for both audiences.

 

Journey Map

  • After conducting user research I put together a journey map to outline the users
    step by step interactions and how they feel

  • Building a journey maps helps us designers understand pain points and why customers go through it

  • As a designer using journey maps helps me analyze the customer experience and see
    were we can improve designs

  • Looking at data often fails to tell the customer journey/experience so using method which is also refered
    to as story telling is very useful and productive

User Flow

  • Having a user flow gives you the advantage of visualizing the process and sequence a user goes through.

  • This process is important because it gives you the option to change the flow before you proceed and get too deep.

  • There are many different paths a user can take from start to finish which is all presented in a user flow.

  • Presenting the flow of your product to project managers or stakeholders is an important step to obtain feedback

 DESIGN

Solving the issues with a MVP

 

Lo-Fidelity Wireframes

  • Very useful in the early stages of product development as it focus mainly on the functionality

  • Excludes colors and logos and uses shapes to image place holders to show

  • Outlines the flow to check the usability and functionality

  • Easy to get user feedback and make changes

 
 
 
 

Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

  • At this stage its a good time to gather feedback on how the product looks before it heads to the engineering team

  • Provides teams such as marketing, sales, business development good insight on what they are woking with

  • Perfect stage to validate proposed design though testing

  • In progress to build prototypes that are clickable

 
 
 
 
 
 

 DELIVERY

Validation that the problems are solved based on the original value proposition

 

Usability Test

I had a few user run tests to see how efficient my product was. I gave them tasks such signing up, choosing a group that best fits their needs, try to transferring funds and adjust the settings. Fortunately everything went well as planned. As this app we are creating is still in development and many moving pieces, it will require us to run more usability testing.

-Signing up -Publishing a property

-Looking up a property -Looking up properties on the market place

-Investment calculator

Conclusion

When starting to work for Bitprops, I spent most of my days researching the business model we aimed to follow and how we would execute on it. Understanding industry terminology and financial data used also took me some time to comprehend at a proficient level. Working on the design was my favorite part on this project. With sufficient help from the other researchers and designers we were able to collaborate very well. We still have more research we need to conduct and interview users to get a better insight on our product moving forward.