Asking sensitive questions to improve property purchase experience.
With Crowdhouse in 2019.
I joined Crowdhouse to improve the product experience and design features inspired by the company’s vision: render the Swiss property market transparent, efficient and accessible.
© Photo by Crowdhouse
About Crowdhouse
Crowdhouse offers accessible investments in Swiss real estate. Founded and profitable since its 2015 start, it has grown to over 140 employees and placed nearly 1 Billion CHF of real estate with investors through our platforms.
I teamed-up with researchers, developers, managers, salespersons, real estate advisors and customers to improve the product experience and design new features.
Designing a core product experience
Being part of the product design team for over three years, I worked on many features and projects to improve the product experience. The latest project I worked on was building a buyer profile completion for our customers. This helps our real estate advisors and sales to propose tailored property based on our customer personal informations.
The biggest challenge with the project was figuring out how to ask sensitive questions – income and wealth – to the customer in a way that didn’t stop him giving us the information and felt lightweight at the same time.
Early thoughts about the project (here is the epic level card)
User journey
As a team, we started off by locking ourselves up in a room in our office with sharpies and a stack of stickies. The goal for this exercise was to uncover different problems that occur during the buyer profile completiton experience.
So we started listing off everything that could occur during the process: the customer answers some questions, skip a few of them, then he might want to stop the process now and continues it later.
This is just one of the many scenarios we uncovered.
User journey mapping
The plan
After many conversations, here is what we ended up with: have a multi-step questionnaire where the customers can fill in their personal information and save them into their buyer profile.
We also came up with a series of objectives that would help us determine if the project was successful:
Easyness
Despite the important number of questions, the completion process should feel quick and easy.
Clarity
Customers should be able to quickly understand all pertinent questions about real estate jargon.
Positive effect
Customers should feel positive about progress in their buyer profile completion.
Trust
Customers should trust their sensitive data is stored in a secure location.
Ordering the questions in wireframes
Conversational user interface
The design exploration has resulted in that a conversational user interface would appear to be the best way to display our numerous questions. Also, this interface decision adds unconscious layers of trust and security as people use apps with similar interfaces on a daily basis (Message, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.).
© Photo by Apple, WhatsApp and Facebook
Components
A selection of components I designed for this project. The components at Crowdhouse are distributed through a Github repository – our design system – across all our apps.
Customer Research
Understanding workflow and problems of our customers is key to improve the product experience. Here is an overview of research techniques I have practiced to get a better understanding of our customers.
High fidelity prototypes
On-site usability-tests
Off-site usability-tests
What I learned
Focus on the problem, not the solution. A big part of design happens away from the computer. Earlier in my career, I would often jump to solutions as soon as possible without having the complete big picture. On this project, I realised that by taking the time to research, listen and understand, I did not only create better solutions but also gained time as the whole team was aligned on the objectives from the beginning.
Try everything. During the design exploration to solve the problem(s) you’ve discovered, make sure you try as many ideas as you can. It’s highly unlikely that your first idea ends up being the best one, but when you’ve tried everything the solution is forcibly hidden somewhere in there.
The content is a key part of your design. When you’re talking about increasing clarity and trust, the content is crucial. Having copywritters involved from a very early stage allowed us to produce design that suits the content, rather than the opposite.
© 2023 Maxime Amoudruz