Introduction

A good engineering friend of mine and I paired up, and for several months we fully specced, designed, and launched a mobile app from the ground up. This was one of those situations where a friend of a friend of a friend had a company looking to build a mobile app for their business. We teamed up, put together our pitch and were awarded the contract to build out this mobile app for a major Chicago-land real estate firm. I got the chance to lead the design of a mobile app from the ground up.

This was a lot of work outside of my full-time job. At the time I hadn't touched mobile apps much, and really wanted the opportunity to design and ship one as I particularly enjoy working on mobile apps.

This was an already established brand with a handful of guidelines already in place. The new app needed to match the look and feel of the current brand, while providing what is essentially the capabilities of what Redfin or Zillow may offer to the masses. This business sells and brokers some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Their users expect a high-touch and tailored experience, and by offering their own mobile app to help facilitate this process, it was a way for our client to really elevate their brand perception and further help facilitate the sales process.

This is a luxury MLS buying and renting platform, and before I dove into the designs itself I myself needed to take time to understand the users, target audience, and most importantly the real estate industry. This app didn't require a ton of "discovery" in the traditional sense, as the target users and many of the potential use-cases were already defined. This was a very "execution" focused project in the sense that the end result was tightly defined. Any of the usability testing or experiential aspects would have to be done on the way to the finish line.

The focus was meeting the requirements on time, building and prototyping slick UI, and making sure that the client felt heard and included in the process while simultaneously taking calculated risks with the user experience and trying to wrap my head around the real estate buying and selling process.

No one design project every truly fits the mold of "process", and this project was certainly no exception.

Names have been replaced and a fake logo is used.

This was one of the more challenging user journeys I had to work on. It needed to define the flows of 3 different user types, and it was actually quite dense in its requirements. Each user journey had multiple touchpoints where information was shared between them as the sales journey developed.

I created this journey in close collaboration with the client, interpreting their ideas and business needs into these flows to both make sure that I capture their understanding and that the functionality itself is covered, but also to be used as a guide for engineering. It's our Map of Truth™ that guided the entire project.

Happy to review this in more detail upon request.