REMARK

The Complete Story

Problem and Needs

Remark had researched and established that sharing listing notes and preferences were some of the most significant pain points in buying a home through a realtor. Their solution was to build a powerful home browsing experience akin to Zillow but with added communication between the home-buyer and realtor. What was needed was a way to bring all these features together in an experience that was stress-free and intuitive.

 The Process - Designing a Solution

Collecting our initial research and testing I compared our findings with the current product road map and the team’s backlog. Because of the short timeline, I wanted to be sure we weren’t covering old ground or solving problems already solved. From this review of what the engineering team had already built and what was already planned, I outlined three design principles that we would need to prioritize:

1. Intuitive Layout

   • Once a property was selected from a search, much of the information was organized behind small tabs. While this works well for desktop, on mobile (especially small phones), this made navigation incredibly hard. Put simply, the app needed better usability.

2. Emphasize Sharing

   • One of the app’s primary goals was to provide communication between a home-buyer and realtor, yet currently, there was no functionality to encourage the behavior. What was missing were ways to share, favorite, and leave notes on a property.

3. Easy Search

   • The search for the app was incredibly cumbersome to navigate and lacked many of the features users would be expecting

Remark had a working structure, but it desperately needed to rebuild older designs and build out the most vital features before it started anything new.

The simplest things are sometimes the most difficult to get right, so building Remark to be more intuitive was no easy thing. To do it correctly I knew some amount of user testing would be extremely valuable. Hoping I could create something fast enough to test with some thoroughness, I started with a somewhat simple layout.

As I building out new prototypes I also began to prepare a list of test users from the team’s stakeholders who might volunteer to help with testing, knowing that I could at least perform the testing on people outside the team. As the prototypes developed and received feedback from the team, we began to formalize a more complete and polished design. Once I began sharing the designs with my volunteer testers, one design was a clear favorite. Quickly moving forward with the preferred design, after a few more weeks we had a very strong design that offered simplicity and shared a clear solution to homebuyer’s problems.

The most significant functionalities were to add communication in the forms of icons for sharing, favoriting, and a new feature called “Remark.” Remarking was adding a specialized note on the property that would immediately be shared with the user’s realtor. After continued confusion about how “Remark” worked, I also added the options to “Call” or “Message.” Lastly, some changes in text hierarchy served to give more information in a much more readable way.

While the team was happy with this design and it received positive feedback, it still didn’t feel right. Going back through previous interview notes, I realized that users still had problems with three tabs. In this second version with a few information hierarchy changes we manage to remove the functions of Notes and Tags, and instead added one tab called “Remark.” This had the added benefit of improving the power of the Remark feature give it more real estate.

While I was confident I had made the property pages better, the step before the property pages (searching) was still performing poorly. Again, relying on user testing and gathering feedback, I set out to understand how to improve the search.

After looking at the data and understanding what technical problems I would face, I proposed including set groups for browsing and two forms of search: List and Map. Groups for browsing were often created because the first thing a user did was add a filter or sort, so including this as a feature would make things much more manageable. Additionally, including both a Map search and a List search is a common feature in other apps. As a result, our test users were disappointed not to see it. As a final fix, we created two views.