mgosline@gmail.com
Case Study
Designing & building a new vision for how owners sell their homes on Aalto
Overview
My Role
Lead Designer
Timeframe
5 Months
Contribution
Strategy, Research, UX, Visuals
Overview
What's Aalto?
Aalto is a real estate marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect directly to make a home sale online.
How did you contribute to the project?
After accumulating six months worth of insights from user interviews, I put together a concept for how we might simplify our product experience. Working alongside my PM counterpart, we pitched the idea to leadership and the larger company. Buy-in came swiftly and from there I crafted the full strategy, all of the UX and finally the hi-fidelity mocks for engineering.
The Issue
Sellers were listing their homes on Aalto in large numbers but rarely coming back to the platform. We wanted to understand why and what could be done.
The solution started with users
For months prior to the start of the project, our team had been interviewing Sellers with homes listed on Aalto. The qualitative data we gathered during these interview sessions, combined with our app usage metrics, gave us a clear understanding of where the current product was excelling and failing.
Key Insights
Not enough buyer interest
Homes were sitting on the platform for weeks with little to no signal from buyers. Without signal from buyers, most sellers quickly lost interest in the platform.
More selling guidance
Aalto’s product provided little guidance on how to improve buyer interest in sellers’ homes, how to price accurately, or how to market their homes.
UX was holding back activity
The product itself was difficult to use. It’s structure was built for an ideal, linear journey and most selling experiences were anything but linear.
Opportunities
Out of our research we settled on three areas for improvement
Curate
We will help focus Sellers attention on the most impactful steps they can take to build buyer interest and maximize sale potential
Communicate
Signal from buyers lives in multiple places within the existing app. We need a centralized place for all buyer messages, tour requests and offers.
Clarify
Streamline & improve the UX to lower cognitive burden and help set expectations immediately.