Product Designer | BiggerPockets
REAL ESTATE MARKET PLACE
BiggerPockets helps users learn about real estate investing and part of the product suite includes a marketplace that lists available real estate opportunities that are geared toward investing. As a business, BiggerPockets wanted to elevate its marketplace to increase engagement and user value to this area of the site so it can more effectively compete with competitors.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
As a business BiggerPockets wants to increase usage of the marketplace.
THE USER PROBLEM
Users have a hard time navigating the marketplace.
Users have a hard time knowing if the listing is a good investment opportunity.
THE GOAL
Make the marketplace easier to use.
Increase engagement metrics.
Role
As lead designer, I own the discovery, strategy, and design of the project. I am 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 and ux of core features to increase engagement metrics.
DISCOVERY
Leveraged several research methods to inform the designs:
External research was conducted to understand the competitive landscape and to extract product-specific features.
Usability tests, user surveys, and engagement data (clicks, conversion, scroll depth, filter engagement, etc.) were accessed to better understand what was currently working and not working for users.
I distilled the collective data to identify user pain points and foundational functions to create a clear benchmark for the updated marketplace experience.
Key Insights
Users have a hard time searching by location
Users have a hard time using the filters
Users want an interactive map
Users want to see relevant investment metrics about the property (current rent, projected rent, etc.)
From there several hypotheses were generated and tested for validation..
THE DESIGNS
Focused on several key areas of the design to improve user engagement and meet business goals.
Restructured the layout of the listing cards to feature relevant information for the user, made it easier to scan and compare listings, and simplified the UI to be more clean and modern.
Reconfigured the search and filter features to be more prominent, always accessible, and follow a familiar design pattern.
Focused on making the design responsive.
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:
Listings viewed: 145% increase
Based on these results we were able to release the design to 100% and have seen a steady increase in engagement MoM.
Testing continues to improve user engagement and business revenue.