Research , Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual and Interaction Design, Web Development
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Spoke is a social media advertising tool that lets real estate agents target their local audiences with effective campaigns. Spoke is a product of Rexlabs - the prop tech house I worked for as a product designer.
At the time of this project listing campaigns were the most popular feature of Spoke. They allow real estate agents to effectively advertise their current property listings to potential buyers. But as our user base and business grew, we were looking for more ways for real estate agents to also prospect sellers to expand their client base.
In my capacity as product designer on this project, I worked alongside the team of one other product designer, one PM and two developers. My role included acting as user researcher, content strategist, visual and interaction designer and finally front-end development.
The team's previous user research has shown a high demand for one potential new campaign type: Advertising sold listings. This has come up in user interviews, sales and account manager calls multiple times. To further validate this demand the team released a website offering new campaign types as a "Spring Special" and tracked how many people went for each of the campaign ideas. The idea of advertising sold listings was by far the most popular.
The new campaign type was called "Digital Drops" and was advertised to agents as the equivalent of letter box drops - an offline marketing tactic that is very popular in the real estate industry (essentially distributing flyers of their recently sold homes into letter boxes of their "farm area" i.e. the targeted area they work in).
After establishing that there was a demand for the new campaign type and gathering basic user requirements through user research (done by the team before I came onto the project) the work ahead was clear: create a new flow for the campaign type within the product (UX) and new ad templates, which would sit within the product and determine what the ads would look like once they were launched.
In the spirit of iterative design we decided to bring an MVP to the market within one 2-week sprint with the goal of later improving the experience. In order to achieve this ambitious timeline we also planned to re-use as much of the existing componentry and UX to create the MVP.
With an ambitious deadline in place we decided to replicate Spoke's existing core campaign creation flow and adjust the UX to allow users to create "Digital Drop Campaigns". To identify other areas that needed adjustment I conducted a UX audit. The following areas stood out:
- New multi-select components that would allow users to both select and manage multiple listings (vs only one previously) throughout the flow
- New audiences within our Facebook and Google integrations to target prospective sellers (instead of buyers)
In addition to adapting the UX flow, we also needed to create new ad templates for the "Digital Drops" campaigns. As these ad templates would act as a "mould" for our users' assets including images and brand colours, the design needed to be thoroughly thought through. We wanted to push the design to be more modern and visually appealing but had the constraint of functionality and versatility.
Before designing the new templates I had done some research on what content elements are typically included in "just sold" advertising. For that I looked at offline print flyers, real estate websites and portals and settled on the content elements we would include in the MVP.
I then ideated different ad layouts in three different categories (Graphical Overlays, Image Framing and Collaging) before identifying the ones that met the constraints of functionality. One such constraint was that organically shaped graphical overlays could often cover up important parts of an image (e.g. the pool of the house) and as we have no control over the images our users upload, using such overlays was not an option.
Having identified the ad templates that would work for us from a usability stand-point, I then proceeded to test these templates for versatility, using the brand colours of our biggest corporate clients.
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This helped me further narrowing down our template options. It is important to note that given the tight deadline we were operating on, we decided to park the template design as this would have taken further development resources. Instead we would pick them up at a later stage.
Before releasing the new campaign type into product we launched it into the app's BETA environment and conducted user testing sessions with a small number of users. We tested both the UX of the campaign flow (for usability) and the landing page (for clarity) and summarised our findings in the user research tool Dovetail.
Our research didn't uncover any major usability issues. This was most likely in part due to the fact that the user experience of the new campaign type was very similar to that of the existing campaigns, which were familiar to the users. One finding we had was that users would like to be able to also launch a "Digital Drop" of individual listings (instead of multi-listings only). We iterated based on this feedback and then it was time to plan release management. 🎉
To market the new campaign type my fellow designer designed a simple one-page
landing page. In addition we created a social media campaign and sent out an EDM and an in-app message to our existing users. Having just completed a course in HTML, CSS and Javascript I took on the challenge to code the Landing Page, as this helped us free up important Front-end Dev resources for the UX flow.
Once the new campaign type was launched, we used multiple quantitative and qualitative sources to gather insights on the performance of it:
Quantitative:
- Overall number of launched campaigns
- In-app tracking in combination with Fullstory to see when users struggle or drop off
Qualitative:
- Notes on account manager calls
- Direct user feedback through Intercom messages
- A follow-up survey through in-app messaging
I then drew up a report outlining the bugs that were reported, the feedback we received and improvement suggestions, helping us iterate on "Digital Drops" in the future.
Since the launch, Digital Drop have become the second most popular feature after listing campaigns, contributing to 20% of our overall campaign volume each month.