top of page
Product Design / Fintech
Strategizing for a personalized homebuying experience
Role
Product Designer
Platform
Android and iOS
Duration
Aug '22 - May'23 (9 months)
Overview
Aabode is a full-service mortgage and home-buying toolkit to streamline today’s home-buying process.
It is an interactive project management tool for information, analytics, and record-keeping to help homebuyers and homeowners prepare ahead and guide them through the process.
"I need help buying a house."
Problem
The current home buying process is outdated, highly inefficient, and often discriminatory, alienating self-employed individuals, business owners, gig economy workers, and women primary borrowers.
“How might we simplify the home-buying process to help homebuyers prepare ahead to make the journey more accessible, interactive, and friction-free?”
Outcome
Designed and tested a mobile application to guide homebuyers throughout their journey which peaked user interest and validated several product features resulting in a 60% increase in user engagement.
Features
My Journey
Manage and track progress in one place.
Users can monitor their progress and stay aware of current events. They get to see and learn about a full breakdown of steps they need to complete to successfully own a home.
Onboarding
Quick onboarding to personalize the experience
Designed to personalize every user to their own customized homebuying path based on where they are in the process. This gives all homebuyers an opportunity to seek for help and guidance.
Lessons and Tools
Learn and Do tasks to keep up with the process.
Switch between the tabs to learn about the step, and perform related tasks to apply what you've learned. Or just perform tasks to be prepared to collaborate with external actors involved through every step.
__________________
Define
01.
What is Aabode?
Aabode is a financial mentorship app to help guide and democratize home-buying to everyone in the United States regardless of their age, background, and economic standing. Aabode aims to eliminate all biases that currently exist and the unknowns of the today's complicated process.
To get a clear idea of Aabode and its users, our team gathered information through the following research,
-
25 user interviews with homebuyers
-
3 stakeholder interviews.
-
Competitive Analysis of similar products and services.
Themes that emerged from affinity mapping.
Click to zoom in!
02.
Who are Aabode's target users?
From research data that was provided, self-employed individuals, business owners, gig economy workers, and women primary borrowers experience more biases in the process as opposed to others. Aabode aims to provide a high-level of resources and services at every step of the process for anyone, mainly young individuals between the ages of 18 - 36.
Through the workshop, we aligned on that the most critical problem of the process was the complexity of figuring out the what and how to dos in home-buying. Not knowing where to start, which sources are reliable, and gathering information from various resources, is a lot of effort and an overwhelming process that discourages users who are new to the game.
"I didn't know where to start. I'm a first-generation immigrant, I didn't have family to guide me. I asked around but I wasn't sure who to trust. I ended up taking a course in the nearest community college to guide me through the process." - Participant 3
03.
What is holding Aabode back?
Since we were building an application from scratch, we struggled with the ambiguity of deciding which critical problem we should solve first.
To align the team, I facilitated a How Might We (HMW) workshop to walk through insights from user interviews and competitive analysis data and identify the direction we wanted to go.
Results of our target focus.
Click to zoom in!
Solution
01.
How do homebuyers buy homes today?
Homebuying involves a tedious 13-step process. We mapped out a step-by-step experience of a prospective homebuyer and their interactions with other actors involved during the process to understand and visualize how and where the application can play a key role in improving the current scenario.
Current system mapped out with notes of design ideas at each step.
02.
Brainstorming solutions
Now that we defined the key problems, our team went through several brainstorming sessions to ideate potential solutions. We also included the client's insights through a co-design session to know which direction they wanted to head towards as a business.
Sketched solutions from the team
-2%201.png)
Storyboarding the user journey
03.
Prototyping
To develop the concept and receive valuable feedback from the users, I designed high-fidelity prototypes that can be used for testing. Based on the identified scenarios, I broke the design down into three user flows:
a. Onboarding novice and expert users.
b. Track progress and scroll through personalized feed in homebuying.
c. Learn and perform tasks using tools based on where you are in the process.
Evaluation
01.
What did we test for?
We conducted usability tests with 25 homebuyers (5 every sprint) to gather more user data and test our assumptions. An example of the tasks involved in the user test can be found here.
Our main objective for user testing was to gather user behavior data to resolve assumptions and determine product-market fit.
#1
Can we convey digestable and bite-sized homebuying information?
#2
Can homebuyers trust and rely on Aabode as a resource?
#3
Can homebuyers leverage the lessons and tools available?
For each user test, we measured the following,
Increased trust in using the application
Number of participants who trust the resources and tools available on the app.
Reduced complexity at every step in the process
5 point rating on ease of use compared to the existing resources.
Increased financial confidence
Qualitatively assess users' confidence in their journey.
02.
Key Findings
Finding #1
Homebuyers need a progress tracker.
“It would be nice to have a tracker of where we are in the journey and a list of to-dos.”
Finding #3
Trust concerns of external article links.
“Explore feed looks like clickbait.”
Finding #2
Users would like to know more about the lessons featured.
“Would be nice to know what the lessons are about in this stage as an overview.”
Finding #4
Users are intimidated by the number of steps involved.
“I’m intimidated by the number of steps I see here.”
Design & Handoff
Style guide
Components
Designing based on user feedback,
Impact
From the initial users tests to the last one, we recorded an increase in user engagement with the applications' product features.
15/25
users found the app useful and trustworthy
60%
increase in user engagement
What's next?
We shared our design recommendations with the client and discussed the next steps for implementation. Since our proposed solution would need a lot of development work, we realized that we need to break it down into smaller parts. To do this, we gave each feature a priority based on our research, to see which ones would be the most helpful to the users.
Working closely with the stakeholders, we created a roadmap that outlined the implementation process. Our aim was to ensure that our client had a clear understanding of our design, making it easier for them to implement it successfully.
Reflection
Working for positive societal impact
Working on this project with a passionate and dedicated team was incredibly fulfilling. Their feedback and enthusiasm served as a constant source of motivation for us. It was truly rewarding to witness the potential in making a positive impact in our community as a step towards democratizing homebuying.
Defining product scope
It was a challenging experience to lay out the product vision and strategy in efforts to discovering the essential product features. Working closely with the stakeholders gave us great insights to begin with. Following the design sprint methodology, and a mix of research methods laid a strong foundation for our clients to continue their build.
bottom of page