Property Search & Underwriting Experience Designs
User Research, Persona, User Journey, Interaction Design, Usability Testing, Visual Design
Overview
This project is initiated to figure out how our internal Underwriting Analysts currently underwrite properties for different investment strategies using Roofstock’s Internal System. By fully understanding their current workflow, we want to design a better experience for them to significantly increase speed and accuracy when offering properties.
Challenge
The current Roofstock system has been quite engineering-focused. User experience was not part of the requirement when this system was first build a couple years ago. Because of this lack of foundation, one of the first part was to tackle the underwriting process that our underwriting analysts had to go through day in and day out.
The main issue was that our underwriting analysts have to use 5–6 tools switching back and forth to find the proper information in order to evaluate each property. This process results in time-consuming performance and our underwriting analysts were unable to meet their monthly goals of underwriting properties. Currently, they could only underwrite 5–10 properties daily.
My Role
I was the lead researcher and designer for this project. I setup all research and design process and documentation for standardization. I’ve also connected teams together who previously worked in siloes to understand how workflows and bottlenecks shift from one team to another based on traditional real estate investing process. During my evaluation of our current entire system from a product design perspective including information architecture, I’ve also understood and initiated our product strategy in order to make this company successful.
Solution
This project is a significant success because we’ve reduced the amount of time for our underwriting analysts by 50%. They are now able to underwrite 20–30 properties daily. Also, this new design requires less cognitive load for our underwriting analysts to remember where everything is; it is now much more intuitive to them to do their job, and they feel much happier because of this new design. This project was also the first to have gone through the proper user experience design process in order to achieve this guaranteed success.
(See Confluence Design Documentation for in-depth details)
User Research
We want to understand what are our Underwriting Analysts are going through right now when they are trying to underwrite properties. Also, we want to know what their goals are, how many digital tools (i.e. emails, BPM, Zillow, Redfin, MLS, etc.) and physical tools (i.e. laptop, extra monitors, phone calls, etc.) they’re currently using, and how they communicate, and what are the major pain points they currently have with our current internal system.
The main research question we can to address is:
How can our underwriters quickly and accurately find more suitable SFR investment opportunities for our institutional investors using BPM, so that our underwriting team can increase their chances of sellers accepting more offers?
We have drafted an interview plan to conduct internal user research and documented the feedback from a total of 5 team members from the Underwriting Team.
Open-coding/Affinity Diagram
We performed a quick open-coding exercise to analyze and synthesize the user feedback gathered in the user interviews.
There are 5 major themes found in this user research effort:
- I can’t really assess the photos, street view, and map in details to determine feasibility and rehab costs right now.
- It takes me a long time to underwrite each property, especially finding rent & sold comps because everything is scattered.
- I have trouble tracking and saving information for each of the properties I was underwriting.
- I have to communicate with external usersthrough a common email and often I don’t know who owns what.
- I have to cross-check a lot of information for each property because the data and/or calculations were incorrect.
Through this analysis, we found that a lot of these pain points are reducing our Underwriting Analysts’ productivity and efficiency, which would cause issues for them to reach their goals of acquiring properties for each investment strategy.
Persona
The personas below represent the two types of target audience we would like to design for: 1) Sadie, the Expert Underwriter, and 2) Lorie, the Ambitious Director. Both of these are internal users who have different behaviors, goals, motivation, pain points, needs and wants. However, both of these personas are on the same team trying to achieve the same common goal — to acquire as many properties to fit different buyboxes driven by business needs.
They are categorized into two tiers: Team Member and Team Leader:
Team Member: This user is the one who gets the job done by acquiring as many properties that fit their assigned buyboxes as possible, the combine workforce and collaboration of all the team members will be the main success of a part of the business.
Team Leader: This user leads all the team members and oversees the entire process to make sure the team is going in the right direction. He/she makes strategic decisions based on performance, trends, markets, results, and makes changes if necessary to make sure the work being done is worthwhile in order to reach the target goal.
User Journey
Once the user research was complete, we created a user journey to illustrate the Underwriting Analysts’ workflow and their major pain points when going through the underwriting process.
Current User Flow Overview
The underwriting analysts currently use multiple tools to perform underwriting:
- Microsoft Outlook/phone call for online and offline communication
- BPM for Underwriting and making offers
- Microsoft Excel for rehab cost calculations
- Various MLS websites for finding rent and sold (After Repair Value — ARV) comps
- Zillow & Redfin for looking at and/or verifying property photos and details
They are currently switching between multiple tools listed above with 2+ monitors/screens to access the information they needed to underwrite each property. As the user journey on the right shows, figuring out “Estimate Rent” and “Estimate ARV” are the major pain points they currently have because the time it takes to search, filter and review different comps is long (i.e. 15+ minutes) for each property. The current BPM system only provides a couple features that the Underwriting Analysts need.
Proposed User Flow Overview
This proposed user journey on the right is created to increase productivity and efficiency:
- Limit to 1–2 tools for the Underwriting Analysts to review property photos, find rent/sold (ARV) comps, and assess property details without needing to go outside of BPM.
- Provide system-driven functions such as auto-calculate, auto-populate, auto-fill, inline validation, auto-save to increase efficiency.
The above proposed solutions would significantly reduce the amount of time the Underwriting Analysts would switch between different tools and different browser windows. Also, because the external websites such as MLS were not designed with the user in mind either, this particular nuisance adds to the time it takes for them to underwrite a property. Every minute/every second counts for the Underwriting Analysts as they have to repeat the same process over and over again for each property they underwrite. We need to be cognizant of each element we design for them.
Interaction Design
For this project, only the pages related to the Underwriting Process is re-designed. All other pages within the internal system remain the same. The goal of the interaction design is to create an interactive layout that is much more intuitive to the Underwriting Analysts.
Below are some of the existing components re-designed with the corresponding immediate positive impact to the Underwriting Analysts’ user experience:
The design elements have been updated based on the user needs and analysis:
Design Updates #1: All elements and details are above the fold.
- Rationale & Impact: Users do not need to scroll to look at important information.
Design Update #2: Search bar with saved listings are static/sticky.
- Rationale & Impact: Users can easily switch to different markets without having to click multiple times to get back to the search page.
Design Update #3: Tabs (on the left hand module) are re-used to show photos, maps, rent comps, ARV comps, and details as a dynamic panel.
- Rationale & Impact: Users can access every feature in these tabs as supposed to what they currently are doing (i.e. going to MLS, Zillow, Redfin, etc).
Design Update #4: Re-layout user interface within pages for better usability.
- Rationale & Impact: Users can easily find information and/or take action faster because the page is laid out in a more intuitive way.
Design Update #5: Re-structure information within each page for better readability.
- Rationale & Impact: Users can scan information across the pages to make initial decisions.
Design Update #6: Re-label certain Call-to-Action buttons and other related components.
- Rationale & Impact: Users don’t have to figure out what each CTA does.
Usability Testing
Because this underwriting experience is for internal users, we had the opportunity to test with 100% of our users to validate any navigational, label, and interaction issues. I conducted moderated usability testing and prepared tasks for each user to complete, and iterated the designs based on their feedback to test again.
This process took a total of 7 days before we move forward with visual design elements.
Visual Design
We chose a color palette that still has the orange color as the main CTA, these colors were added to the wireframes as the final visual design elements.
Key Takeaway
This project took a total of one month to complete user research, interaction design and visual design before beginning development. Since this design is vastly different from the current design system, engineering needed two whole months to develop this entirely new underwriting experience for our underwriters.
- From the users’ perspective, this was a drastic improvement and delightful experience for them because not only did it is easier to use, but their workflow is much shorter and intuitive for them to accomplish their day-to-day tasks.
- From an engineering perspective, this is a completely different UI outside of the current design library, so the code base is also harder to maintain for their team. This is a reminder for me to create a design library for future projects so that we can keep the experience consistent.
- This project overhauled the underwriting design experience, and was served as a proof of concept to demonstrate how powerful and valuable UX is for any projects within the company.
