TRELORA PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOL
TRELORA is a real estate company that uses a proprietary project management tool enabling each agent to do 30x the industry average of transactions a year.
OVERVIEW
TRELORA’s real estate agents and their supporting team utilize a proprietary internal tool all day, every day to guide clients through the home buying and home selling process from start to finish.
Team
UX/UI Designer - Mia Donnell
Product Manager - Zack Sulskey
Developers - Blake Worsley, Tyler Long, Robbie Lane, Ian Crosser
Tools Used
Sketch
InVision
Zeplin
Opportunity
This tool was initially designed by developers. As of early 2018, it had not been updated since its inception around 2014. The tools features include task management, search, client information, messaging, reporting and more. It had enabled our teams to handle hundreds of transactions over the past four years, but it was quite clunky and had many quirks that left its user feeling like it slowed them down.
This project management tool affects everything agents do. If we could increase their efficiency, we could free up more time for agents to do important things such as talking to clients. It was clear that by improving this project management tool, we could not only improve the efficiency and happiness of the teams but also affect the bottom line with more transactions in less time.
GOALS
Increase efficiency of agents and their teams
Improve quality of communication with customers
Make the tool more intuitive
RESEARCH
My research began by shadowing the six different roles that compromise a team which included:
Lead Agent oversees and leads the team throughout the transaction, communicating with and advising the buyer or seller.
Co-Agent assists the Lead Agent in communicating and advising the buyer or seller.
Coordinator assists the Lead Agent and Co-Agent in managing the logistics of the transaction
Showing Agent shows homes to potential buyers.
Home Agent onboards new customers and converts potential customers.
Home Advisor visits seller’s homes and advises them on a competitive price based on the market.
Preliminary Interviews
I was most interested in learning how each different role utilizes the tool throughout their day. I wanted to know what their processes and routines were including things that go well and things that are frustrating. What do they do when they get into the office in the morning? What do they do at the end of the day? How do they manage tasks, phone calls, emails, and unexpected events?
Key Takeaways:
Primary actions were searching for client pages, texting clients, messaging their team, completing tasks, viewing information, and data entry.
Each team member needed to search for clients, which became frustrating because search results were unpredictable.
Uploading, viewing and sharing documents was a multi-step, time-consuming process.
The navigation contained a lot of irrelevant and unused elements.
Planning to Update
After my preliminary research, I worked with the Project Manager and developers to identify the areas of improvement, how long the updates would take, and the level of complexity for each update. There were many considerations, including the fragile code base which would limit the number of major UI changes we could make without overhauling large chunks of the tool.
Our plan of attack was to identify small improvements that we could release quickly, in tandem with redesigning larger chunks of the product, testing our designs and involving our users as much as possible.
Our first feature to redesign was the search functionality, the most consistently used and vital feature. Improving search functionality would enable agents to more quickly address client needs over the phone instead of keeping clients on hold for indeterminably long.
IMPROVING SEARCH
Before beginning on any design, I interviewed six people in different roles to learn what and how they were searching. I found that when searching, our users were looking for client pages. These pages contain messages, tasks, documents, and details about each transaction.
Search Terms Used:
Client’s address - number and street
Client’s last name
Last four digits of the client’s phone number
I was also curious about the information they were looking for in the search results. We displayed a good amount of information about each client in the search results, and I was curious if all of this information was really necessary.
Original Desktop Search Results There were multiple links and actions one could take with each search result. My hypothesis was that none of these actions and information were needed in the search results.
Actions Taken
All six users stated that 99% of the time they only clicked the link that took them to the client page. They rarely utilized the other links as those were accessible from the client page.
Information Needed
I asked each person to rate the information they needed to know from most important to least important.
Must-Have Data in Search Results:
Address
Name(s)
Phone Number
Status
Nice to Have Data in Search Results:
Team that client is assigned to
Type of Transaction (Selling or Buying)
Market (Denver or Seattle)
Search Conundrum
Throughout my interviews, I heard over and over again that search results seemed to be displayed in a random order. This resulted in users not always seeing their result at the top or even on the first page. Their workaround was to search for a different term to find the page, for instance instead of searching by address, they may try the clients last name.
This process drastically slowed our users down. This was especially distressing when they had a client on the phone and needed to access their information.
Learning How Search Works
I wanted to know the parameters the current search used to display results, so I spoke with our back-end developer. I learned that:
Our search was looking through all instances of the search term in every client page (if you search “Cherry” you’d get results for Cherry St. and any other instance found like Drew Cherrymore).
Results were sorted by the date a client signed up for our services. This explained the randomness as a client may have signed up in January, but they may not sell or buy their house until December.
This way of showing results was not very intuitive. Since I now knew what our users were looking for we could improve what was being searched and how it is displayed in results. One of the first areas of improvements that the product manager and I identified was the search bar. We could make an improvement to the search bar without any large UI changes by simply suggesting types of searches in a drop down menu.
Original Search Bar
Search Bar design
The search bar had no fancy functionality. The user simply typed in their term and hit enter, which would take them to the search results page.
I came up with a few iterations of how we could improve the search bar and, in turn, improve the results displayed.
A search bar design with recent searches and type ahead results populated in a drop down menu.
Iteration One
Initially I wanted to show recent searches when the user clicked into the search box since a little over half of the users mentioned that they revisit certain client pages in a day. I also wanted to display type ahead results categorized by type. (eg. Name, Address, Phone) so that users could skip the search results page altogether thereby saving them a step.
A search bar design allowing the user to tell the search engine the type of search term they were typing.
Iteration Two
I came up with a second solution that allowed the user to select the type of search they were entering, enabling the search criteria to be more focused.
After speaking with the developers, Iteration Two was the winner. Showing the type ahead results in Iteration One was going to take much longer in development. This update was able to take place in about one week, giving us that quick turnaround time we were hoping for.
User Feedback
I revisited the people I interviewed at the beginning and gathered their feedback on the search bar redesign.
I have had good reports from everyone stating that their desired search result appearing in the first few results. We have also received emails from real estate agents saying that they have tried to stump the search by typing in addresses that the previous search would never pull up correctly. Thankfully, with the new implementation of the search bar and parameters, they were able to find what they were looking for.
WHAT’S NEXT
We are currently working on improving the UI and functionality of the search results page. This is one of the larger pieces of the redesign that will take more development time. It is currently planned for implementation in January 2019.
Based on the data collected from previous interviews, I was able to distill the actions and information needed on the search results page. We will be adding a filter bar which will pre-filter users search based on their team and role. This is because our users rarely look up clients that are not assigned to them, but if they ever needed to they could by simply changing the filters.
The redesigned results will have one action (clicking on the purple address) which will take them to the client page. The results will display all pertinent information they need to identify the client, and they can easily narrow their results with the filters.
Mobile Results
Currently our mobile search results are difficult to use. They are displayed in a scrolling table which makes seeing everything at a glance impossible.
While most users are on desktop, we do have some employees that show homes and hold pricing appointments that have stated they would use the mobile website if it was easier to use. They currently go to coffee shops or wait until they get home to utilize internal tool.
With the new design, I distilled the desktop design to display only the most necessary data points to allow for easy scanning on mobile.
The updated mobile search results show all of the must-have information and allow the user to click on the address which takes them to the client page. They can also filter their results further if needed.
RETROSPECTIVE
I believe that the improvements to the search bar and filter perimeters have met the overarching goals of this design overhaul.
Increase efficiency of agents and their teams: We have had many reports of our users being able to quickly find what they were looking for in a timely manner.
Improve quality of communication with customers: Customers do not have to wait on the phone as long now that it is easier to pull up their information.
Making the tool more intuitive: The search results are less random and are ordered in a more predictable way.
Looking Back
My team has just implemented a tool that will measure the amount of time spent in each area of the tool. I believe this quantitative data would have been helpful to compare before and after time spent. I believe that having both qualitative and quantitative data is important in making a holistic decision. That being said this was an incremental change that users have reported that sped up their process.
This project is still ongoing, but it has been one of the most interesting and rewarding products I’ve work on. I am excited by the fact that the changes made to this tool directly benefit its users and the business. Even small but strategic changes are noticed and appreciated.