Product Designer | BiggerPockets
REAL ESTATE DIRECTORY
A core product for BiggerPockets is the vendor directory where they connect real estate investors with real estate professionals to help investors throughout the buying, selling, and rehabbing process. In an effort to increase user engagement, lead generation, and advertising revenue within the directory, BiggerPockets was looking to improve the UX and UI of the vendor directory.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
As a business BiggerPockets wants users to convert with more real estate professionals.
As a business BiggerPockets wants to be able to charge businesses to advertise on the page.
THE USER PROBLEM
A user wants to be presented with the right information to help them narrow down the list of real estate professionals in order to convert with a real estate professional(s).
THE GOAL
Increase user engagement.
Increase conversion rate.
Increase the number of real estate professionals a user converts with.
MY ROLE
As lead designer, I owned the discovery, strategy, and design of the project. I focused on using data to inform my solution in order to create the best user experience while balancing business goals. My core focus for the project was to improve the navigation, layout, structure of content, type of content, and placement of calls to action to improve engagement and conversion within the directories.
DISCOVERY
Leveraged three research methods to inform the designs:
External research was conducted to understand the competitive landscape and to extract product-specific features.
Engagement data was accessed to better understand what was currently working and not working for users. Ex clicks, conversions, scroll depth, filter engagement, etc.
Leveraged user interview data to understand what information was relevant to users in order to convert.
I distilled the collective data to identify user pain points and foundational functions to create a clear benchmark for the updated directory experience.
Key Insights
Users want to see social validation through reviews
Users want to understand what the pro specializes in
Users want to understand what differentiates the pro
Users have trouble using the existing filters
Users do not find value in seeing stats with empty results
THE DESIGNS
Focused on several key areas of the design to improve user engagement and meet business goals.
Restructured and simplified the UX & UI of the page to make it easy for users to filter, compare, and contact real estate professionals.
Updated the pro cards to feature information that is important to users when selecting a real estate professional.
Reconfigured the search and filter features to be more prominent, always accessible, and follow a familiar design pattern.
Focused on making CTAs more prominent and incorporated a quick contact form for easy conversion that keeps users in the experience to engage with more pros.
THE RESULTS
An A/B test was conducted to test the new design against the existing one. After running for several weeks we saw the following results for the new design:
Number of leads: 56% increase MoM
Revenue/lead: 62% increase MoM
Profile views: 56% increase MoM
Search/filter bar engagement: 46% increase in usage MoM
Conversion rate: 89% increase
Based on these results we were able to release the design to 100% and have seen a steady increase in leads MoM.
Testing continues to improve user engagement and business revenue.