Project overview
The multi-stage overhaul of the Nobul messaging system was primarily a 'loss prevention' initiative spanning approximately 21 weeks, including development.
Ultimately, the project not only led to increased user retention and engagement rates but also successfully achieved the primary goal of preventing further revenue losses.
Project background
How was the messaging system related to revenue?
Nobul's core business model is to profit off of connecting home buyers or sellers with reliable real estate agents who collaborate with us by taking a small cut off of the total transaction amount when a partner agent has successfully closed a deal with the client we have introduced to them.
To ensure that the company can keep a good track of the transactions happening through its marketplace, a relatively simple agent-client messaging system was introduced during late 2018.
Background problem
The messaging system was unable to track transactions
In recent years, we have realized that the messaging system that was supposed to help the company keep track of the transactions was heavily under-utilized.
Half of the homebuyer/seller user base were either actively asking for or agreeing to the usage of alternative communication methods.
Most of our partnering agents would rather use other tool to talk with their clients after getting hired.
This has resulted in around 1/2 of the connected clients leaving Nobul altogether after their agent has requested for their personal contact methods.
Our task
Stop the bleeding
Between Jan 22 to Jun 22 alone, our finance team found that the number of deals closed behind our back was in the low double digits.
As a result, the product team was tasked with finding ways to reduce the number of missed deals by at least 50%.
Secondary research
Taking a deeper look at the issue with a product audit
To figure out why many users weren’t using our messaging system, I did a thorough product review. This included market research, user journey analysis, and a deep dive into the user feedback we’ve collected over the past 2 years.
By the end of the week-long audit, we identified three main problem areas.
Problem area No.1
Disjointed communication experience
Our system was missing many key features essential for a modern communication tool.
Most of our users were deeply troubled by the messaging system's inability to send photos and documents. This limitation essentially forced them to use alternative tools.
In addition, since the messaging system didn’t offer easy ways for users to do essential tasks like hiring agents or scheduling home tours, they were constantly forced to leave the system to get things done. This major inconvenience made the overall user experience feel really disjointed.
The two user journey charts below illustrate the number of times a user has to leave our messaging system when working with an agent through our platform.
To have an easier time referring to these moments throughout the project, I named these moments Points Of Exit (POEs).
Problem area No.2
Poor communication efficiency
Feedback from the past couple of years indicates that our agents have been unhappy with our messaging system for a long time.
In addition to being frustrated by the inability to send photos or documents, they were also deeply bothered by the lack of features to help streamline their workflow.
Problem area No.3
Visual clutter and poor usability
Many of the users we spoke with over the past years mentioned problems related to visual clutter, unintuitive information presentation, and unthoughtful feature implementation. It was clear to me that these usability issues could no longer be ignored.
Unexpected constraints
Pushback from both the upper level stakeholders and developers
So after engaging in some extensive conversation with the head of product and the technical team that would be responsible for implementing the design of this project, we found out that there were two main reasons for why the communication system never included basic functions like sending or receiving photos or documents.
Misguided assumption
Costly implementation
Problem validation
Additional user research
The goal of the interview was to validate the user pain points discovered during the product review and narrow down the list of items we should focus on fixing with this project by finding out what mattered to our users the most.
What did the research accomplished?
This round of research confirmed all of our previous findings and got to understand user pain points better
This round of user research pretty much validated all of our previous findings and we were also able to gain some deeper understanding into the issues that were experienced by our users the most.
Removal of detrimental constraints
Got some great news from the tech team after touching base with them again!
To better understand the developmental effort required to add the file transfer feature, I reengaged with the development team to explore alternative, less resource-intensive implementation methods.
After investigating various approaches, we discovered that adding file transfer support is now less complex and more affordable than anticipated.
In the end, we were successful in gaining the necessary approval to proceed with our plan, using new user research insights and the updated development estimation from our technical team.
Define goals
Guide the rest of the project with clearly defined objectives
Now that we have a clear understanding of the issues we need to address, we've finally defined our project goal.
How might we make the communication experience more streamlined and efficient for the user so they feel incentivized to stay engaged with each other using our messaging system during their real estate journeys?
After discussions with the technical team, we decided to focus our efforts on addressing the most impactful issues affecting the overall user experience.
01
Reduce the chance of users exiting the messaging system during their user journey
02
Make it easier for agents to provide updates to their clients
03
Address major usability issues whenever it is technically feasible to do so
Roll out plan
A multi-phase feature rollout plan
To ensure that we leave enough time for the development team to appropriately implement the design solution, the pm and I have decided that it would be better if we were to execute this project in two phases.
Phase one
Remove Point Of Exits
In the first phase, I focused on creating solutions to remove as many POEs from the current user journey as possible while also spending time optimizing the overall UI to create a cleaner and more intuitive visual experience.
Phase two
Add automation
Following the successful completion of phase one, I moved on to phase two, focusing on adding automation to the client progress update workflow in a technically feasible way.
Phase one - Tackling the disjointed UX
Create a more immersive experience by enabling users to accomplish more tasks within the messaging system
Based on the data gathered during our secondary research, we discovered that users were mainly frustrated by their inability to complete tasks within the messaging system. Therefore, for phase one, our goal was to offer users with a more immersive communication experience that enables users to smoothly transition from one task to another without any hindrances during their real estate journey.
Define scope
Choose the point of exit to be eliminated
Even with a file transfer system, users will still face many exit points during their real estate journey, making it unrealistic to fix them all.
After looking over the user journey charts for home buyers and sellers and considering our project timeline, we've picked five main exit points to focus on.
POEs to be eliminated
Problem areas that could be resolved by solutions that are more technically feasible under the time and resource constraint we had.
Revisit in the future
Problem areas that were more challenging to find a solution for the time being. It is likely that we would want to revisit them in the future.
Not within scope
Problem areas that are either too technically difficult to provide a solution for or are already resolved by the file transfer system.
Exploring various approaches
Identify the optimal approach that delivers the desired user experience
We explored a few different approaches, ranging from highly technically feasible solutions to options that required the development of new components with UI interactions that have never existed in our design system before.
Approach 1
New page / Tab
Rejected
Approach 2
Overlay
Not good enough
Approach 3
Side panel
Perfered
Actualize the solution
The 'Quick Action Hub'
Before proceeding with the design solution, the PM and I spent some time further developing our ideas. In the end, we decided to name the new feature the 'Quick Action Hub.' This feature would be a slide-in side panel that allows users to compare agents, hire them, book new tours, reschedule tours, and leave reviews, all in one convenient place.
Decide on basic layout
Flexible width and fixed width
I also briefly explored with the concept of flexible width layout vs a fixed-width layout. In the end, the fixed width layout was selected because it was going to significantly reduced the implementation complexity under our chosen front-end framework.
Tackle agent compare & hire
Streamline the agent comparison and hiring experience within the messaging system
I worked closely with the product manager to sort out a list of "must have" information that would be placed on this page based on the user research results obtained previously.
Tackle home tour scheduling
Provide users with a faster way to schedule their new home tours
To give our development team enough time for the new feature, we reused existing design components with small changes for several parts of the updated tour booking page, like the date selector and property cards.
Tackle home tour rescheduling
Make home tours rescheduling more convenient when using the message system
Tackle agent review
Provide users with the ability to leave an agent review directly within the chat
Optimize layout
A more effective layout for the new hub
The screen space allocation for the contact list and chat UI was redesigned to provide users with access to more features and functions on a single screen, maximizing screen real estate utilization.
Final design in action
Usability optimization
Main quality of life changes in phase one
According to the feedback we got from interviewing users earlier, the old user interface had many issues that were causing a lot of frustration to users.
Below is the before & after comparison demonstrating some of the more notable changes I have made during stage one of this project.
Phase one impact
Higher user satisfaction after phase one
Although the data science team did not observe a noticeable improvement in user metrics during the first month after launching the new messaging system, our customer service team has reported that more users now view the Nobul messaging system more positively than before.
"Using the messaging hub right now make much more sense compared to before."
From a home buyer in Toronto
"I no longer feel like I have to provide personal contact methods when I am deciding on who I want to work with!"
From a home seller in Edmonton
Phase two - Add automation
Give our agents more reason to communicate through Nobul actively
While the number of agent using the system was a lot better than before after phase one was implemented, we believed that implementing what we had planned for phase two was still very crucial to achieving the overall goal of improving tracking efficiency by at least 50%.
Define an agent's journey
Draft up the home buying and selling workflow
To begin the design process for phrase two, I drafted up a chart to visualize the different stages that agents would need to go through during a typical home buying and selling journey.
Pre-generated messages
Create a versatile template that agents can leverage at every stage of the process
After analyzing user interview feedback and reviewing conversation samples from the data science team, we concluded that providing agents with pre-generated messages for their updates would be the most impactful feature to enhance communication efficiency.
After extensive exploration, we have finalized the format presented below.
Define interaction framework
Leveraging a proven design to speed things up
Considering the positive response we have received after implementing the quick action hub in stage one, we have decided to reuse the new hub's interaction and layout design to host this new one-click progress update feature.
Hi Fidelity design
Automatic progress update in action
Even though we were still under heavy time constraints, I was able to validate the design with our internal real estate agent experience advisor.
Usability optimization
Notable UI optimization done in phase two
Below is the before & after comparison demonstrating some of the more notable changes I have made during stage one of this project.
Results & afterthoughts
Project overall impact
After successfully implementing everything that was planned in stage two of the messaging system revamp project, the product team closely collaborated with the data and finance team to monitor the performance of the new messaging system.
After approximately six months of observation, I was thrilled to discover that the project had resulted in a significant improvement in all key user metrics, and we also observed a considerable decrease in the number of missed deals.
Home buyer & seller retention
+75%
From 50% to 88%
The percentage of homebuyers and sellers utilizing Nobul's messaging system has significantly increased, indicating high satisfaction among non-agent users.
User engagement post hire
+248%
From 25% to 87%
The amount of our partnering agents using the Nobul messaging system after being hired by a client more than doubled, indicating that most of our agents have found the new messaging system to be more useful and effective.
Transaction tracking efficiency
+73%
From low two digits to mid-single digit
As reported by Nobul's financial department, our efforts to increase the utilization of the messaging system have been successful in discouraging agents from closing deals behind our back.
Afterthoughts
Well, I supposed the biggest lesson I have learned from this project is that even when developing an MVP, omitting essential features due to a lack of understanding of user needs can be a costly mistake.
Because the company didn't recognize the risks of leaving out key features when they first introduced the messaging system, the decision ended up costing the company hundreds of thousands in revenue.
Therefore, in the future, I would always try to make the recommendation to conduct thorough research to ensure that all necessary features are included in the intial project’s scope, even if it would result in higher costs in the short term.
