Product Designer - Portland

Tricon Homes.

Product Design, 2016

Project background

In 2016 I worked with a team of engineers, project manager, stakeholders to redesign how customers apply for real estate in California. It started as a simple problem. "How might we speed up the application process so customers can easily apply for homes.”

Discovery and interviewing stakeholders

We ran multiple sessions with stakeholders to understand the current painpoints customers and Tricon team members were having. This included a whiteboard session and weekly touch meetings to map out the journey of users. Overall the time of this discovery took around three weeks.

  • Current users did not understand the status of their application.
  • The current steps (only 3) did not communicate how long the application would take.
  • Tricon's team members struggled to review applications slowing down approvals.

    • Heuristics

    An audit of the application helped us prioritize what we needed in the redesign of the application. While there were basic performance problems we tried to focus on the main usability problems gathered from stakeholders and Five Talent's team.

    Top insights

  • It was difficult to know how to apply with multiple applicants.
  • Users could not save their progress
  • Trying to apply with more than two applicants very difficult.
  • Mobile input fields went against best practices
  • There was not a way to pay seperately or together with multiple applicants.

    • Problems

    We then broke down these heuristics into problems. After we had the problem statements I worked on wireframes and design. We had two weekly checkins with Tricon to bounce ideas and test designs on.

  • How might we apply with multiple applicants and keep security a priority.
  • How might we design an application where users can save their progress.
  • How might we provide a way for applicants to pay seperatley or together.

    • Design and ideation

    We went through a series of different flows, wireframes, designs. After working through designs I personally ran usability testing on our different versions. We had really great feedback during these sessions. There were a few iterations where it was not clear in our original design how to apply for multiple applicants.

    Outcomes

  • Since going to production customers have created over 20,000 accounts.
  • Tricon's internal team can approve and deny an application in their own customer system.
  • Usability has improved. I do not have a metric to this (did not have enough for a SUS score)
  • Users can now apply with multiple applicants.

    • Lessons learned

    This was an interesting project because a lot of the usability testing was done by trial and error. We experimented with a lot of different scenarios. While I am writing this it has been almost 4 years since I started on this applicaiton. If I could do the project again I probably would have suggested more discovery interviews with current customers. We could have researched more on how customers flow into the application itself. We were so focused on the redesign I think we could have taken a step back and researched how customers reach the application. We then could have looked at how customers can apply for multiple homes at once.