Vendor Network

Product Time:

Phase 1: 2019 May to June (10 Days)
Phase 2: 2019 June (2 Days)
Phase 3: 2019 Oct to Nov (2 Weeks)

My Role:

Introduced the UX process to the product.
Conducted user interviews with PM, created a user journey maps and prioritized pain points.
Determined design scopes and roadmaps of design and test.
Led the UX and UI design iterations - wireframe, hi-fi design and user testings.
Worked with the PM and development team in an agile environment.
Conducted UAT and training when the product was released.

Tools:

Sketch, Axure RP 8, Photoshop, InVision, SendGrid (Emails), Miro, and High Five (Meeting and Testing).

Strategy:

Full stack design, define design scopes.

The Start

In May 2019, I received one message from an onboarding agent in the real estate department. Let’s call her Jenny.

EMPATHIZE

I went for a coffee break with Jenny got to know her and her work better. I asked a couple of questions to understand where her pains came from.

When is the peak season?
How many clients do you have now?
How many clients are expecting in the peak season?
What do you do every day?
Which part of work brings you the biggest headache?
How do other onboarding agents feel about this?

Who is Jenny and what does she do?

Jenny worked closely with internal buyer/listing agents, clients, and vendors. Thus, I partnered with the product manager to conducted 10 interviews of other onboarding agents, client managers, and real estate agents to tackle the process and dug deeper into problems of scheduling showings, services and listing homes.

What were the big moments for Jenny and her team?

What were the big problems for them?

DEFINE

Instead of Jenny couldn’t serve more clients, I defined the problem by using WHO, WHAT, WHY, and HOW statement.

From big to small

After understanding the overall problems, I brought product owners, director of engineers together to discuss scopes and determine the success metrics to deliver in a short timeline. With 3 weeks of development time, we decided to focus on the first two phases which could bring the biggest efficiency to agents and move phase 3 with low priority to late September.

PROTOTYPE, TEST, AND ITERATE

Design And Solutions - Phase 1 (10 Days)

I conducted market research to see what other apps or tools to help with automating scheduling services appointments. I ended up building a solution by updating the way to create and automate the scheduling experience integrate with SMS and emails.

How to make onboarding agents less overwhelmed by job requests?

Although the first iteration had some problems need to be addressed, it would increase the efficiency of onboarding agents. So the product manager and I set up this the next day. Meanwhile, I was working on a better solution.

I decided to execute this solution because onboarding agents didn’t need to touch anything during the process. For other buyer/listing agents and client managers, they still were the job creators. Instead of creating job requests in other places, they could enter information into CRM and one more click to publish the job, even on their phones.

How to reduce the manual works of scheduling a service?

I ideated several solutions that vendors also could be more proactive and engaged with the process. Here is the persona of one vendor who was going to use this product.

The design decision I made was to go with idea 3.

For onboarding agents. all previous manual works could be automated.
For vendors, it was easy to accept and view instructions.
For engineers, it would take too long to implement it.

What did I do for design and delivery?

Design And Solutions - Phase 2 (2 Days)

The summer peak was around the corner. The design scope for this phase was to set up a new recruiting experience to recruit vendors and remaining the way to add vendors in the system and pay them.

I looked through the suggested platform and sit with the manager to determine the new process. The next day, I set the new experience up in 3 hours with one onboarding agent.

NOTE: Due to some confidential information, I couldn’t show the whole product here. But I displayed the flow and one screen as an example below.

Design And Solutions - Phase 3 (2 weeks)

I started Phase 3 in October to avoid having too many changes that affected business during the peak season. What problems did Jenny have right now? Anything new problems from the market expansion?

One onboarding agent attended the design workshop I held to ideate solutions and prioritized features with product owners, listing agents, and engineers. We discussed the pros and cons of individual vendors and 3rd party vendor companies.

After two weeks of working with a selected national-wide 3rd party vendor company to conduct photo styling and photography services. It turned out well and ended up with a long term contract.

What were the problems I should solve now?

The product manager read API documents first and I defined the design scope with her to integrate API with the client portal and CRM.

What were the design principles and final designs?

Since this was a product enhancement and there would not be a big feature design. I directly designed the high-fidelity screens by using components from our design system.

PRODUCT Impacts

THE TAKEAWAYS

OUTCOMES = PROGRESS.

This is the first time our team used Lean UX. Having a cross-functional team with the product manager, designer, engineers, and agents speeded up our work. The team was focused on problem-solving instead of ideas and features. I loved the way we worked so closely and made decisions quickly.

Great Thanks To The Team:

Product Manager - Peter Yobo & Illiana Reed
Engineers - Ryan Perry & Paul Day
Lead CRM Engineer - Sarfraz Khan