Building Trust, with property evaluations.
This case study focuses on the Market Value Calculator, a key feature inside the EspaceProprio’s Homeowners application.
This company was formed when four organizations came together under Desjardins’ ownership, with the goal of building an ecosystem that met homeowners’ needs. The Market Value Calculator, that was built into the app, offered real-time property assessment, to help users feel connected with the unified brand.
Essentially, the free tool provided a way to estimate a home’s value, while fostering familiarity and trust with the new ecosystem.
My role: Product Design, coordinating strategy and hands-on UX/UI
Context
At the start of the project, we faced the challenge of designing without the tool infrastructure, navigating uncertainty from the outset.
At that point The Market Value Calculator (MV) interface had to be built from scratch. With only broad objectives and outdated initial wireframes, so we turned to existing user feedback from the original planning phase to guide basic decisions.
This input helped us identify limitations and opportunities, allowing us to align design and development as we progressed.
Process
We followed an iterative design methodology, leveraging initial user findings and close collaboration with the Dev team to uncover system infrastructure constraints, ensuring alignment between visual aspects and tool capabilities.
Due to the feature's data-heavy nature and technical complexity, it was crucial to hold alignment workshops with system architects, back-end developers, and external providers. Regular discussions with the Product Owner and stakeholders ensured all key requirements were met.
My task was to lead design efforts, Sometimes independently hands on, and at times overseeing a couple of designers (as needed), ensuring consistency across both UX and UI based on project expected velocity.
We used tools like diagrams, task flows, wireframes, and prototypes to capture agreements, clarify project uncertainties, and drive towards something that resonated with the team.
Results
After a year of close collaboration with both internal and external teams, and leveraging tools to map out technical details, the app successfully launched at the end of 2023.
Released initially as a beta version, it allowed us to gather valuable user feedback. This information uncovered both unexpected improvement opportunities and strong indicators of user engagement.
These insights were essential for guiding the next phase of development, driving continuous iterations and ensuring the app evolves in line with user needs and expectations, responding to the evolving landscape.
What the initiative covered
Was to lead the design efforts as needed, balancing hands-on UI/UX work with overseeing collaborators (UI designers and UX content creators). These responsibilities included:
To align stakeholders on objectives, creating UX materials as support
To clarify technical knowns/unknowns, and used them to generate design specifications
Collaborating with the Project Managers (PM) and the Project Owner (PO) to define deliverables and adapt processes as necessary
Designing key Interface screens for use and iteration by teammates.
Facilitating communication between designers, content, developers, and partners to ensure alignment and consistency for successful UI assets
Mapping user paths and behaviors
Diagrams were essential for mapping the interface and interactions, helping us identify potential issues early and ensure a stable product. For example, mapping the user paths to edge cases and errors, helped to manage the expectations of the user once the tool launched for an internal user sample.
These tools validated user feedback and highlighted opportunities to reduce setup time. They also provided a shared reference for development and QA teams, enabling effective collaboration and problem-solving.
The impact of complexities
Simple UI elements, like an address autocomplete field or a real-time graph, can hide technical complexities. For example, the address input needed to handle database interactions and edge cases like rural or new addresses, which if poorly implemented, led to user frustration.
Similarly, a real-time graph caused confusion due to mismatched units and representation, making it appear unresponsive.
After refining the interaction and adding visual feedback, we aimed to align it with the user’s mental model. Although these changes seemed minor, they required close collaboration with developers to ensure technical feasibility and scalability, ultimately demonstrating how small UX tweaks can have a significant impact on the Task Completion metric.
As a different case, the image below illustrates a scenario where a calculation wasn’t available.
Initially, the calculation followed a series of questions sequence, yet if any step couldn’t be completed or key information was missing, it was necessary to inform the user.
This led to the creation of the 'unhappy path,’ and later error and edge cases, with a series of wireframes and UI bits that provided feedback and fallback solutions for these scenarios.
This wireframe setup helped analysts and developers provide feedback on tool limitations, highlighting areas for adjustments within time and budget constraints.
Each screen represented the starting point of a different path, sparking conversations to identify and wireframe additional scenarios.
Final thoughts
After a multi-level integration of diverse perspectives, the new beta feature for the Market Value calculator tool was successfully launched. In projects with many unknowns, establishing a solid structure and fostering collaboration are essential for achieving a cohesive outcome… all while staying friends! 🤭
This release marks the start of an ongoing process, where user observations will guide future improvements and updates.
I appreciate you for reaching this point, not everybody does, and I’m excited to share the next project with you!