Equity Multiple

March 2020

Resources Page Re-design

Provide discoverability of real-estate investment resources to provide investors access to educational resources.

Industry

FinTech

Platforms

Responsive-Web

My Role

Product Designer,
Strategist &
Facilitator

Website

Visit Website

Project Overview

About the Project

Equity Multiple is a technology-enabled real estate company. It connects accredited individuals with commercial real estate.

Equity Multiple needed a redesign to the resources center to comply with usability's best practices and improve discoverability and suggestions of relevant articles tailored to the user's preference and needs.

My Team

Will Heydt-Minor- UX Writer
Peter Hsiao- Product Designer
Heather Sterman- UX Researcher
Soren Godbersen- VP of Marketing
David Gonzalez- Principal Designer

My Responsibilities

My Responsibilities included:

Conducting usability testing with existing site users.
Facilitating brainstorming sessions with the team and stakeholders.
Creating prototypes.
Turning conceptual designs into high-fidelity wireframes.

Timeline

4 Weeks, (February-March 2020)

The Challenge

The resources center had a high bounce rate and the discoverability of articles, had limited search preference, and filters did not curate the content to the user's liking. How might we make Equity Multiple investment resources discoverable and match user's preferences?

Research

Identifying Users Pain Points

It was essential to understand what were the major pain points. We relied on usage metrics and subject-matter experts to understand where those pain points were.

Key Pain Points

1. Lack of discoverability.
2. Inability to filter.
3. Trusting articles sources,
4. Overwhelming amounts of unorganized articles.

Existing Research
Hand-Off

The client provided us with several assets like user interview data and user personas done previously within the company that could help save time to go directly to designing.

However, I advocated to conduct user interviews again for the following reasons:

1. Lack of Problem Space Related Questions
Users were asked questions specific to a completely different problem space than the one we were currently solving.

2. Knowing the "Why"
There was not enough quantitative data to even understand general user behaviors.

The Star aka “The User”

First Target User
A user who has made one or more investments through Equity Multiple.

Second Target User
A user interested in investing in real estate and interested in investing in platforms like Equity Multiple..

The Challenge #2

Our target users were niche users that were difficult to recruit without external third-party user research platforms. The client also was unable to provide us with users to research with; as a team, we were hit with a blocker.

"Any user data is better than no data"

-Mariyam Elshrief’s motto

Complementary Users

We decided to pivot by zooming out and recruiting complementary users. This type of audience invests, but just not necessarily in real estate.

New Target Audience

1. Have experience in investing, whether in the private or public market.
2. Have invested in real-estate or any types of investment.

User Persona

User Testing on Existing Site

I conducted usability testing on five users to observe the user's pain point and behaviors in real time so that I could understand how they currently find their resources.

When users landed on Resources, they weren’t able to understand

Same stock images were used for different articles, which made users doubt the validity of the sources

Users got confused between Press and Articles since both of them were present on the Resources Page

Filtering articles was very limiting and didn't give users filtering options that fit their preferences

Ideation

We started brainstorming sketches and came up with conceptual designs to visualize and identify what would work and what wouldn’t.

Sketches

Figma

Transforming sketches into Mid-Fidelity wireframes

Introduction about types of resources that can be found

Author bio pop-up for credibility of the articles

Suggestion of relevant articles based on recent trends

Various filter options to fit users preferences

High-Fidelity

We iterated to a high-fidelity design based on user's feedback and
needs collected from our mid-fidelity designs.

Various filter option for discoverability of resources that fits with the user’s preference and level of knowledge.

Addition of an intro video to discuss the various forms of resources.

User’s would see the latest articles by trend as soon as they land on the resources page.

Author bio pop-up to showcase the credibility of the articles and that they are written by experts.

Prototype

Outcome &Takeaways

1. Navigating Ambiguity
‍
Acknowledging that it’s okay if we don't have the answers for everything. It’s learning by doing and finding things out along the process.

2. Scalability
‍
I wish I understood the business value behind resources redesign; what kind of business need does it achieve? Usually, an investment in UX means a business need is backing it up.

Additional Discussions
‍
Points which are not covered but could be worth discussing

1. Heuristic Evaluation
2. COVID Impact
3. Information Architecture of the Navigation
4. Overwhelming amounts of unorganized articles.

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