Overview
Gohoming.com (now hubzu.com) offers a unique shopping experience for marketing real estate owned properties (REO). It offers a platform to list and place bids or offers on reo properties by selling agents, investors, buyers, buying agents.
Change in business model to accommodate first-time buyers in the system, lead to revamp of Gohoming.com from enterpise centric user interface to customer centric designs. In this project, we re-designed registration pages, payment wizard pages, made significant changes to user flows to make it look like a ecommerce website.
Research and Ideation
We didn't had access to primary users (investors, buyers and buying agents) but we had user data in the form of clicktale recordings and google analytics. Through Clicktale video recordings, user behavioral and their browsing patterns are know. Other details such as heat maps, mouse clicks provide more details which helps to understand task flows of the page.
Next, we did competitive analysis of other major players in the market (auction.com, trulia.com and zillow.com). This helped us to knowing common established UI patterns, setting standards for user flows (registrations and bid/offer wizards).
To understand the needs of our secondary users (listing agents and seller agents), we did an expert interviews with few listing agents present within our organization. First session was a semi-structural interview to know important scenarios and tasks performed by the agents, and followed up with contextual enquiry. During contextual enquiry, I was able to observe how agents create a listings and how they respond back to when buyers requests (access code or plan a visit) or questions.
With the research findings and data, I was able to identify key scenarios and user-flows for the website. Which lead to developing IA and lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes.
Visio wireframes were created to present designs to product owners. Our final requirements to development team were user stories, interactive prototypes (using axure) and visual designs (using photoshop).
We were working in agile environment, we started with making changes on login and registrations pages, and later changed all the user flows and web pages.
Wireframes developed in microsoft visio.
Home page of gohoming.com
Search results page.
Product details page
Auction landing page
My responsibilities
I was the lead designer for the project, and was responsible for user research both qualitative and quantities, and come up with scenarios, user-stories and prototypes. Collaborating with business stakeholders, product team and development team, presenting designs time-to-time and making sure released features have desired interactions.
