HomeStory
Platform Design and Ecosystem • 2016-2017
In 2017 Vast launched the real estate platform HomeStory. The HomeStory platform enables lenders to market loans directly to their customers rather than losing customers in the pre-qualification process during the early stages of the home discovery process. HomeStory provides a white labeled MLS home discovery experience for home shoppers while providing a portal and backend tools to connect lenders and real estate agents to prospective home shoppers.
Role: Design Manager / Principle Product Designer
Overview
Using the HomeStory, banks and mortgage loan providers can market directly to their customer base, capturing consumers early in the sales funnel. HomeStory helps to match prospective home shoppers with a real estate agents and personal mortgage loan offer for the best home buying experience.
Product Overview
Purchasing a home is typically an anxiety-filled experience for most new home buyers. With so many steps in the process, finding the right agent, searching for a home, getting the right loan, it's no wonder that one in three new shoppers are reduced to tears in the process.
HomeStory eases the burden by providing a dedicated team to help walk you through the process from start to finish. With HomeStory you get a highly qualified real estate agent and loan officer as a team to guide you through the process. And you get easy-to-use tools that make home discovery and communication with your team a snap.
Targeted Users
Process of Home Purchasing
Process flow of the generalized steps in the home search and purchase process
HomeStory Search
Utilizing the power of big data to provide a more
robust home discovery process
HomeStory Search is a responsive web enable home discovery product that allows customers to easily find their dream home. Search is powered by Vast's digital virtual real estate network and provides reporting tools and analytics to assist realtors in their customer's search journey.
HomeStory search solves two core problems. First, for consumers a home search that uses big data to thoroughly analyze comparable features and amenities of neighboring homes and integration of financial and payment information within the search. For lenders/agents, it provides real time feedback on what customers are searching, allowing them to make better suggestions to their customers.
Example of a direct to consumer marketing report. My HomeStory Report provides useful information about the value the customer's existing home and gives trends in the real estate market.
HomeStory Connect
Connecting potential home buyers with the right real estate agent
Connect is the layer of the product service that pairs home shoppers with agents and loan officers. Once a team is established, HomeStory Connect facilitates the communication and provides status for complete transparency along the home purchasing journey.
Sample screenshots that show the consistency across the major products of Amazon Music.
For most real estate agents, developing a steady flow of incoming customers is half of their efforts. With HomeStory Connect, highly qualified customers are channeled directly, saving time and effort on marketing and developing potential leads.
From left to right, screenshots that show how the agent provides updates as the home shopper goes through the process of purchasing a home
HomeStory Chatbot
Leveraging the pervasiveness of SMS to deliver quick home search results for the home shopper
With so many real estate and search mobile applications, it's often overwhelming for new home shoppers to know which to install and use. HomeStory Chatbot solves that utilizing one of the most ubiquitous applications on smart and non-smart phones–SMS. Utilizing SMS, users can complete a number of tasks from enrolling in the HomeStory program, searching for homes nearby, as well as having a conversation with the real estate agent and the mortgage loan officer.
Sample interaction with the chatbot that allows a quick home search with a quick command of the native SMS app on any mobile phone – no app needed
HomeStory Vision
Its like Shazam for home searching. Point at a house and learn more.
Searching for a home is a difficult process. With so many websites and mobile applications, its challenging to know where to start. Typical search services aren't very useful when the customer is out driving in the neighborhood, and they omit stylistic qualities that often shape user opinion.
With HomeStory Vision, users can drive through neighborhoods and just point at homes to learn more, and discover homes of similar style and with similar amenities. Using computer vision, each home is analyzed for stylistic qualities - building material, home-style, color and more in order to quantify and match a user's personal preference.
Home searches often overlook the softer qualities of a home – building style, materials, color and local amenities, all of which form the user's personal preference when searching for a home.
A sample visual search on a home that identifies the home, then based on its visual attributes, find other homes that are most similar in visual style, amenities, price, and location.
Design Process
Mapping Out the Experience with User Interviews
Interviews were conducted with current home shoppers, real estate agents and mortgage loan officers to fully understand and map out the process of the home purchase journey. This in turn was then used to identify the pain points and opportunities to inform our product definition decision.
The process starts with understanding the user, their needs and what motivates them.
Through the interview process, we were able to map out the various steps when purchasing a home, communication points between the agent, buyer, and mortgage officer. This allowed the team to have a clearer visualization of the process, helping to identify pain points and areas of opportunity.
Once the process was firmly understood, a larger map was created to help inform and guide team decision making.
Brainstorming and Sketching
Rapid sketches in basic wireframes allowed us to test various layouts and navigation options across the devices with low effort before finalizing design decisions. Wireframes were considered very low fidelity screen mockups and were quickly transitioned into visual prototypes.
Wireframes and Application Flow Diagrams
Quick wireframing in a narrative of user flows helped the team gather input from various stakeholders of the program and gave overall context of the complexity of the underlying business processes and technical dependencies of the service.
Rapid Prototyping
Prototyping was used throughout the process of communicating with stakeholders, potential users and with engineering teams. Prototypes varied depending on objectives–many were fast demos to show overall navigation and flow, others were more robust to demonstrate detailed micro-interactions in the user interface.
Sample prototype for HomeStory Connect using Framer.
My Role
My role on the team was design manager–having direct responsibility for project deliverables while also contributing to the creation of UX artifacts, visual layout, and prototyping. Due to the nature of our small team, playing multiple roles throughout the process was required. In addition to the design components, I helped the team work closely with the product owner and various project constituents as the products were developed.