Restater is an intelligent property valuation tool created by a start-up in Malaga, Spain. It allows users, mainly real estate professionals, to get accurate market valuations of properties. These valuation reports allow them and their clients to understand the realities of the market. For this project we were required to create the entire user journey from landing page through to final valuation report. The product, the report generator, was required to be a minimum viable product that could realistically compete in the market.
The Brief and Scope
Understanding The Problem
8 User Interviews
Extensive Benchmarking
Frequent client meetings
To gather information for this project we contacted dozens of real estate professionals via LinkedIn and personal connections. We were able to have a total of 8 user interviews that helped us better understand the needs of our users and where there might be a gap in the market. We also benchmarked several competitors to get a better understanding of their feature sets and common themes among their branding.
We Wanted To Know…
how/where people currently accessed property valuations
where this data was coming from and how it is useful
users’ experiences with other valuation tools
We Learned That Our Users…
are real estate agents in a competitive market
have clients that do not understand the realities of the market
have difficulty accessing accurate valuation information
So, Let’s Help Them…
have a simple tool that allows them to generate these reports
easily share these reports with their clients
provide reports that are customisable and understandable depending on the end user
User Personas
For this project, through research, it became clear that we would need not only a primary user persona, the real estate professional, but also a secondary one, the client. This became especially important as we would begin to design the valuation report itself as the end user is indeed an average buyer/seller and not a real estate professional. These user personas helped us to set the scene and have a scenario in mind while designing.
Primary Persona
José Perez
Real estate agent
41 years old, Madrid
Needs accurate valuation reports – houses priced correctly sell more quickly.
Needs to keep a competitive edge in the market
Has tried other valuation tools in the past.
Secondary Persona
Paloma Santí
High-school head mistress
51 years old, Madrid
Stubborn negotiator
Needs to sell her mother’s home
Believes her home is worth more than it is
Wants to get the highest price so she can use the money for retirement
The Prototype
Having defined our problem through our extensive research phase we began to create the final product. This product was refined over 15 user and usability tests and 5 rounds of iterations. This testing included moderated usability testing, card sorting, tree testing and desirability testing. Check out the final prototype below! Or click here to see it live in action on Figma.
Landing Page
Subscription Flow
Valuation Report
But how did we get here?
Final Iterations
While I would love to show the dozens of iterations that we made on this project – it would be entirely too much. We iterated many times on navigation styles, copy, colours, and information hierarchy thanks to the information provided to us through our 15 usability and user tests. The final iteration below shows the evolution of the valuation report which proved to be one of the most challenging parts of this project as it required close attention to detail with regards to visual style and hierarchy as well as to the placement of the pieces of information themselves based on users’ expectations.
Looking Back
This two-week client project was very rewarding and challenging at the same time. We ran into several obstacles in our journey starting with a 3 day delay with receiving the full brief material. To overcome this, we quickly adapted our plan to take advantage of this time to do other steps such as user recruitment and benchmarking. We also came up against some challenges with finding users who had experience using valuation tools. To overcome this problem we compiled a list of dozens of estate agents throughout Spain and sent out further requests with a screener question to be sure we would speak to the right people.
All of our hard work paid off as we were awarded at the winners of the best project among several other contenders.
What We Learned
Be sure to have a very specific target user in mind when recruiting for interviews
Having close contact with the client is key for resolving doubts and avoiding problems
When working with complex data visualisation, staying in mid-fidelity for as long as possible saves headaches later