We began with the goal of expanding on the barebones experience of the client-facing platform for real estate agents to showcase Milo’s latest matches based on their search profiles.

During our engagement, I was the sole designer at the company, with a broad array of responsibilities, including redesigning the client-facing responsive web experience on mobile and web. Additionally, facilitating product vision by conceiving, testing, and prototyping new features.

User Personas have repeatedly fallen flat with our internal teams. When building a new feature from scratch, we need to reestablish who our users are and what they need and the same for relevant stakeholders in this experience. This means not only designing for our real estate agent, but the potential array of clients that they may work with, from your first-time homebuyer to seasoned real estate investors.

With these personas, we can define the metrics for success. I worked with the Milo team to identify quantitative (set up through Google Analytics) and qualitative metrics (through user testing) to ensure that product iteration would move forward with clear objectives to improve the experience for our range of users.

With a barebones experience developed by the existing Milo team, I set out to analyze the product at this stage by setting up a diagram showing the information architecture of their initial website experience to the main product. This allows for a birds eye view of the entire experience for our users, and allows the team to identify what the MVP is doing well, and what hiccups are in place.

We begin narrowing our focus onto what the product experience will be like for both our real estate agents and their clients by improving they move from the marketing website to the platform. We are focused on easing up the interruptions our users currently face in the onboarding process of both account creation, and initial platform experience (such as the product tour).

Working with our data science team yields a need to become granular with the particular interaction of lead manipulation on the platform. To ensure the platform experience can improve as the users engage with the platform by providing feedback for the model through NLP (natural language processing) and binary forms of user feedback, such as liking and disliking a listing.

I worked to identify a range of heuristic opportunities with the existing product, which also initiated the creation of an error log for the development team. Establishing a familiarity with the actual experience undergone by our users were critical in understanding what parts of the product were doing well, and what components needed to be strengthened.

With the CEO, Head of Product and Development, we identified all potential features and functions to build. However, within the given timeframe desired to achieve the MVP, we utilized the MoSCoW prioritization method to redefine the scope, and map out what new concepts to build out with the consideration of our user’s behaviors and needs.

Options for the core mechanism defining how the dashboard provides listings to clients and how clients provide feedback for those listings in order to improve the search model’s efficacy are discussed across the development and data science teams. This is the final step we took to consolidate all thoughts toward the new client-facing platform experience.

The preliminary stage of the design kicks off with pen in hand, rapidly exploring potential ways of resolving and bridging opportunities uncovered in the earlier stages of our process to formulate a new vision for the client-facing experience of the product.

Step-by-step user interactions with the platform are mapped out in line with the new, dynamic components that are newly introduced onto platform to reduce barriers, lessen cognitive overload and address potential attention biases that may arise throughout the platform experience.

Our team hits a critical conjuncture as the design begins to surface. This moment serves an important lesson for all product designers. There is no promise that other teammates are as attuned to user needs as the product designer is. An existential crisis appears in the form of question: “ What happens to the value proposition of our main user- the real estate agent- in the face of their clients, while using the client-facing platform?” We freeze, but slowly build up a UX strategy that puts the presence of our agent ahead of the Milo branding.

In-house testing of the wireframe prototype takes us forward to producing a vision for the higher fidelity prototype. A trial of fire occurs as the design system is developed parallel with the prototype at this stage, stringing together elements of the existing product, business strategy, and product vision to produce a unified ethos and aesthetic baseline to guide the rest of the product experience.

We arrive at the current stage of the platform experience for the clients of real estate agents. Here, they can review their latest matches from multiple MLS resources, ensuring the most up-to-date information. Provide specific feedback both for their agent, and the Milo search model through NLP to refine their recommendations. The critical feature of bridging our clients and agents together comes together as an ability to schedule tours.

Milo provides a sense for clients that the platform is continually working for them, looking for real estate listings matches that are attenuated towards their expectations of a future home. This allows agents to spend less time sifting through MLS databases, or setting up often distracting alerts and provides a unified platform experience for them and their clients.