The Problem
The current onboarding system of Brooky for new users takes several sessions to complete. Hence, the initial challenge was, how might we assess the customer sentiments on the current onboarding process of Brooky users?
Several participants could not elaborate on their experience or did not have many thoughts on the onboarding process. Hence, we switch to focus on how to make the users' Brooky experience more convenient and to better understand how Brooky can adapt to changing the users' requirements. The question we asked to guide our research was, how might we evaluate the use of Brooky implemented into Real Estate professionals' work?
The Goal
Evaluate the usability of the app for current Brooky users.
Gain insights on current users' thoughts on Brooky's implementation.
Identify which features are useful, missing, or confusing for the improvement of the platform.
The Method
We selected User Interviews as the method by which we would conduct the research. In the user interviews conducted, participants were asked about their:
Work experience before the pandemic.
Work experience during the pandemic, before Brooky.
Work experience during the pandemic, with Brooky.
Thoughts on Brooky after being implemented in their work for several months.
Discovery Phase
Participant Selection
The team of Brooky was in charge of tapping current Brooky users who were willing to be interviewed on their Brooky experience. There were supposedly twelve (12) participants for this project; only ten (10) participants pushed through. The participants are divided into two (2) categories. The criteria are as follows:
Role in the Real Estate Industry
Real Estate Developers: Small to medium-scale developers, part of the company that aids materials and processes to and from Sales.
Real Estate Sales Agents: Has experience in the real estate manual process.
Use of Brooky
Back-End: This consists of participants who provide the information and materials to upload on Brooky.
Front-End This consists of participants who depend on Brooky to relay the information to buyers and clients.
User Interviews
We then crafted a discussion guide for the User Interviews, the discussion guide was divided into the following sections:
General Information
We asked participants for general information such as their name, their age, their occupation, how long they have worked in the industry, who are the key people they coordinate with, and what their specific tasks are in their jobs.
This is to help Brooky’s sales company create a job description for each task, and this helps to differentiate between who provides information and resources to each participant's category. Additionally, this also helps to have a more whole understanding of their work before and after the pandemic.
Pre-Pandemic Questions
We asked the participants what their job experience was like before the pandemic, when sales and work were in person.
This was so that we could understand what potential tasks needed to be digitized in the coming pandemic, as well as what could be improved to help their online setting.
Pandemic: Before Brooky Questions
We asked what the participants' experiences were when the pandemic affected their work.
This was so we understand what their changes were when the pandemic came, and what their processes were like before having Brooky.
Brooky Experience
We asked a set of questions regarding their initial insights on Brooky as it was about to be implemented, which required our attention.
We asked about the initial onboarding process, who presented it, and how they were after the onboarding process.
We asked the participants several questions along the lines of:
What were their positive thoughts and feelings about the app incorporated into their work?
What were their concerns with the app incorporated into their work?
What features did they find easy and difficult to work with?
Would they recommend the software to other real estate companies?
What suggestions do they have for the improvement of the app?
This was so far, we understood the personal insights and experiences with the app, as well as how it is incorporated into their work.
Wrap-Up Questions
We then asked participants their overall thoughts about the Brooky user experience, the data they had, and whatever they would like to share that we were not able to ask or tackle.
We also asked what specific feature they would want to add if they were given the opportunity to add or create for the platform.
This was so that we could touch on anything that may have been on their mind but was not in our questionnaires.
The second question was to see if there were certain features or special tasks that would be important in the app, to bring out certain pain points they might not have considered previously.
Design Phase
Affinity Diagram
Following the completion of ten (10) interviews, the collected data were compiled, noted, and prepared for analysis.
An affinity diagramming method was utilized to gather information, group data by category, and identify similar issues and key patterns that would guide the rest of the project. This collaborative whiteboard tool, Miro, was used to create the affinity diagram. All research findings, based on participants' answers, were collated to find recurring issues and patterns. This process allowed for the organization and synthesis of initial research from user interviews.
Using affinity diagrams allowed for the following:
Visualizing and understanding collected data: Insights commonly shared by participants regarding pain points in working in the real estate industry, both before and during the pandemic, were identified.
Identifying common behaviors among participants: Distinguishing how participants would think, feel, and act about real estate processes and identifying their commonalities was possible. This also included understanding how participants felt and what changes occurred in their work setup before and during the pandemic, and with the implementation of Brooky in their companies.
Easily identifying confusion about and suggestions for development: Interview notes were color-coded based on the nature of participants' statements. This allowed for the identification of areas where participants were most confused and areas with multiple suggestions and recommendations.
Mental Model
Based on the collected data, a UX artifact called the Mental Model was created to further tailor Brooky to its users.
Two (2) mental models were then created, one for each category, focusing on their Brooky experience. These models aim to help understand how users believe things work in their minds, specifically within the Brooky platform. The objective was to observe user thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the platform, including easy and difficult features, and preferred functionalities. This ultimately helps identify difficulties users face and assists in optimizing Brooky's usability.
Results
Participant insights
From the two types of participants, we compiled various insights of the particinapt's mentioned positive impacts, pain points and recommendations that were found in different portions of the interview and collated them together in one portion of the document Throughout the interview, participants would mention their pain points and recommendations in relation to the specific topics brought up. Hence, we grouped together the positive feedback, pain points, and recommendations into categories to have a better focus and understanding.
Participants' positive feedback:
All the participants have positive thoughts and feedback toward Brooky, for different reasons
Participants see Brooky as an innovative company and that the platform helps them to be productive.
Two participants found Brooky's customer service and relationship excellent.
One participant took the opportunity to voice out their realization that they need to work on their use of Brooky's platform and align it to the needs of their agents, since most of them are in their 50s and are not tech-savvy.
Participants' pain points:
Interface: Lacking menu feature, font size too small for visually impaired users.
Access: Need to log in every time they use it, and wait for a coordinator to encode materials.
Technicals: Small typos affect the whole processing or are hard to find, rigid keywords make it difficult to use, and non-customizable computation.
System Issues: Log of reservation and general system affects real-time efficiency, presence of the word "Amazon" in the loading bar (due to Amazon Web Services host being used).
Onboarding Process: Onboarding should be open to a live question-and-answer point.
Moving Forward
Takeaways
This user experience research is the beginning of the continuous improvement of Brooky.
We learned from this project that clients' insights have a large gravity and impact on how we can look at a product. With 10 days of several interviews, we were able to have various insights from different users from the Real Estate Industry in the USA. With that, our own UX question when producing this project was: how might we work with the given data to present it in a way that is able to address cohesive insights, in spite of the different user backgrounds?
We learned from this project that any research done in user experience is about achieving your client's objectives and meeting expectations. We have to go back to the initial plan often, before continuing on to the next phase. Alongside this, as researchers, we also need to be adaptable to the situations given to us, especially in this work-from-home setup.
After this experience, we realized that good UX Research is about guiding and marrying the product, the client, and its users together to find the problem of the aspects of improvement for all the benefit of all stakeholders.
