increase marketplace liquidity
Increase sales rate for aged properties by introducing new platform to transact for buyers and sellers
Company: Auction.com
Auction.com is nation’s leading online marketplace for the disposition of distressed residential properties, providing sellers and buyers with innovative ways to transact distressed assets.
work done - design process
Conceptual Design, Visual Design, and Interaction Design
Sketches, wireframe, whiteboard brainstorm, hi fi prototypes, design iterations, animated prototype, Invision clickable prototype
UX Research
User & Stakeholder Interviews, User Persona, Storyboard, User Journey, and User Flows
Design System, System Style Guide, and Design Toolkit
Collaborated with cross-functional team to get data and insights
Strategy Vision, Ideation, Iteration Present to stakeholders to get buy in
overview
I spearheaded User experience on an innovation product, from conception to launch, coordinating all UX related efforts and leading all research and design. I collaborated with stakeholders, various cross-functional teams, and designers while placing the user at the core of the product design lifecycle.
Success Metrics
In just about a week after the launch (March 2020) sellers loaded more than 400 assets on the new platform and received approximately 325 direct buyer offers.
platform
Responsive Web App
Project timeframe
Nov 2019-March 2020 (4 months)
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Tools Used
Sketch, Invision, Zeplin, Principle, & Figma
PROBLEM OVERVIEW
Decrease in home transactions between buyers and sellers due to unsold assets in auction
When assets are in auctions, these auctions quickly determine the market price and demand of an asset early in the asset lifecycle. Sometimes the market cannot meet the seller at a price that fits the seller’s current expectations. Multi-run assets then have to be removed to reassess those pricing expectations. The inventory of unsold assets are multiplying which is lowering the home transactions rate between buyers and sellers thus decreasing asset sales for Auction.com
The product team at Auction.com has been brainstorming new ways to transact unsold auction assets.
DESIGN SOLUTION
Increase home transactions by allowing buyers to send offers directly to sellers
Introduce Offer Interact platform on which sellers place multi-run REO assets so buyers can submit private bid offers. If sellers receive an acceptable bid, they can accept, reject, or counter. When sellers place these properties in Offer Interact, they appear on the Auction.com marketplace with a label that reads, “Direct Offer”.
Project goal
To find a better way to sell unsold assets that have been on multiple Auction runs – when bids are not reaching Reserve Price for multiple auction runs consecutively, then create an experience where Buyers and Sellers can negotiate until an agreed upon price is reached.
aligning user goals with business Goals
buyer goals
Convenience of submitting offers online
Transparency for seller’s pricing expectations
Faster feedback directly from the seller
seller goals
No more manual back-and-forth communication with Auction.com (ADC).
Immediate visibility of offers received
Direct interaction with buyer (Accept, Decline, Counter Offers)
business goals
Increase sales rate for Aged properties (run 5+).
Marketplace liquidity – speed to sale
Minimize fallout
cross-functional team collaboration
stakeholders
I collaborated with cross-functional teams like Client Management, Data Analytics, Buyer Service, Marketing, Google Analytics, Operations, and Legal to get data insights to understand how the user and business are aligned.
buyer team
I collaborated with the Buyer team as we were building the buyer interface for “Offer Interact” which is called “Direct Offers”. The team included Product Designer, Product Manager, Front End Engineers, Back End Engineers, and QA.
seller team - my team
I collaborated with Seller Team for where I was the lead Product Designer. The team included Product Manager, Front End Engineers, Back End Engineers, and QA.
the design process
Our team followed the Agile Scrum format with daily scrum meetings, and we went through various MVP cycles to come up with the right design solution. Below is my design process that I followed for this project.
Empathize and Discover: I teamed with three project managers and one product designer who led the “Buy-side” to strategize accurate and deep intuitive understanding of the user and translate concepts into features that addressed user’s information needs and behavior.
Interview Stakeholders and Users: I interviewed upper stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints. I met with Client Management and Portfolio Management leads to gain insight into Sell-side Client behavior and expectation. Field studies, Contextual Inquiry in agile format, were conducted where I observed the users, asked questions and listened to them.
Hunt for Data Source and Utilize Metrics and collaborate with diverse teams: We collaborated with Analytics team to get guidance for test and learn approach, and key metrics to track so we could gauge the success of the project. We collaborated with Google Analytics lead to get specs on GA 360 instrumentation on traffic. We also collaborated with Marketing to drive the awareness and adoption of the new product/feature.
Strategy, Vision, Ideation and Iteration: I executed User Journey workshop, created sketches and prototypes with “fail fast and iterate quickly” to ideate, iterate and share the vision with both Buy-side and Sell-side PMs and Buy-side designer so that we maintained consistency in our approach with the storyboard flow. This helped defining the vision and finalize decision on the features and design specs.
Present to upper stakeholders to get buy-in: I presented Buy-side design prototype (both Desktop and Mobile) to executives and senior stakeholders at various stages so we could leverage on early-stage task-flows. We prioritize Desktop vs Mobile features for launch and aligned engineering and QA resources respectively.
Testing and Validation : I tested and validated the designs early and often during various stages of the design process for both Sell-side and Buy-side. I performed qualitative usability testing and evaluated the universal access to my designs
stakeholder interviews
There were a number of stakeholders involved in this project like Executive Sponsor, Legal, Operations, and Client Management. Stakeholder feedback helped understand the Business limitations and goals that I used in designing the product for this project.
user interviews
I interviewed our users who are asset managers from the banks which represent Auction’s sellers. The feedback gave useful insight as to what data they would like to see during an auction and their pain points with the current system.
Findings:
Sellers #1 goal is to move the assets to “sold” disposition.
Sellers would like to be notified instantly about the Offer from the buyer.
Sellers would like to increase the quality of bids and the likelihood of stronger offers, thus have more control.
Analytics
I collaborated with the data analytics team to extract data on Assets to understand patterns on Asset dispositions.
Findings:
Assets were sitting in multiple runs for long periods like 20 -30 runs unsold.
storyboard
I created a storyboard to help communicate the story of how Offer Interact tool will help our sellers in selling their assets faster.
Persona
I created user persona to help define the target user along with its goals and pain points. These pain points are to be addressed in the design solution.
User journey
I executed the User/Buyer Journey workshop where cross-functional teams from Product, Operations, Marketing and Design participated which provided insightful information on the buyer pain points and how we could solve it with Offer Interact.
User Journey Map
User Flow
Findings:
Pain points (opportunities)
Seller Counter bidding
Properties re-auctioned with no apparent changes run after run
Reserve price is not disclosed
These user frustrations are addressed in the design solution of Offer Interact :
Seller Counter bidding reframed as Seller Counteroffer which is a more familiar industry practice (especially for new buyers) when purchasing real estate
Properties re-auctioned Offer listings are perpetual. There is no more run construct. Whenever offers are received, Seller can decision anytime without waiting until a bidding end time
Reserve price is not disclosed we will be providing Offer Guidance in the form of a Suggested Offer Range, Winning Probability,
and Minimum Offer Threshold, all based on the Final Seller Reserve
DESIGN SYSTEM and DESIGN STYLE GUIDE
I collaborated, and scaled Auction.com’s Design System. I also collaborated with Engineers to create Design Toolkit, Storybook (React, React Native), React Semantic UI to maintain Design consistency and Branding for Auction.com.
DESIGN TOOLKIT
Initial conceptual sketches
Based on User Interview feedback and Business goals, I started to conceptualize my designs with sketches.
Initial Sketch 1
Iterative Sketch 1
Initial Sketch 2
Iterative Sketch 2
Initial Sketch 3
Iterative Sketch 3
Wireframes
01. Offer Interact - Assets Displayed with Offers
04. Showing Property Details with a single click
02. View of Offers in Asset Card when opened
Based on the user and stakeholder interviews, I gathered the requirements of what data needs to be preserved on “Offer Interact” so that the user can make informed decision by reading past Auction History, Beds and Bath and Notes from other asset managers.
03. Showing Auction Activity in Same Asset card with a single click
design iterations
Below are the design Iterations when the user clicks on Asset and Asset Details opens up. I have leveraged the existing design of Bid Interact here to see if I can accommodate important features of “Offer Interact” within the parameters of Bid Interact.
Design Iterations
More Design Iterations
Design showing Single Offer
Design Showing Multiple Offer
Design Constraints and design challenge
Based on discussions with Product Managers, Stakeholders, and other team members, we was decided that “Offer Interact” would live inside of Seller Bidding Tool - Bid Interact.
To provide users with a familiar process of using Bid Interact, we decided to design “Offer Interact” as a part of Bid Interact so that the users will have all the necessary information at their fingertips to make the optimal decision when selling their asset.
Now I had to use the existing Design System of Bid Interact for designing “Offer Interact”. The main challenge was to design within the realms of Bid Interact which had one asset per run whereas Offer Interact could have multiple offers per Asset.
“Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use [ISO 1998]”
— Van Harmelen, M., (Ed), Object Modelling and User Interface Design: Designing Interactive Systems, Addison Wesley Longman Object Technology Series, 2001.
There were lots of Design challenges with this project. Offer Interact Sell-side resides inside Portfolio Interact which already has an established Design System. It was very challenging to show intuitively all the relevant info of an asset in one row of an asset. I introduced “Tabs” behavior to leverage all pertinent asset info to be laid out intuitively and in a compact manner. I ended up achieving a high quality user interface by combing these design process methods, i.e.
Parallel Design, where I created multiple alternative designs at the same time, user tested them and created a single merged design.
Iterative Design, to further refine the merged design, it went through multiple iterations. The overall measured usability of this method was higher than the average of the original ones.
On Left- Old bulky Design of Bid Interact. On Right-New Intuitive Design of Tabs
final design sign off- Design UAT
Despite creating design iterations at early-stage task flows, there were numerous design change debates due to engineering and launch date constraints. I collaborated with 2 PMs, 3 Front-End Engineers, 2 Back-End Engineers, and 2 QA Engineers to execute Design User Acceptance Testing (UAT) on each feature to make sure we delivered on fixed launch date with fixed scope.
usability testing
We gathered qualitative data based on usability testing. I conducted User Testing for this project at every step of the iterative process in collaboration with Buy-Side designer to achieve the best results for the product. Based on the usability tests, I improved the designs to meet the expectations of the user. Some tests were remote and some were on premises.
LAUNCH DATE MARCH 2020 & SUCCESS METRICS
In just about a week after the launch, sellers loaded more than 400 assets on the new platform and received approximately 325 direct buyer offers.
In the news
According to Auction.com VP, Market Economic Daren Blomquist, properties available for online auction accounted for more than 50% of individual property page views on the Auction.com website on March 18—the first day this year that online REO auction properties have accounted for more than half of all property page views. The share of page views for online REO auctions has continued to trend higher since then, hitting a new high of 65% on March 31.