My role

UX/UI Designer and UX Researcher

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Key Skills, methods, and tools

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UX/UI Design and Research, wire-framing, prototyping, Visual Design, Graphic Design, Stakeholder Management, Presenting and Deliver the work, Team management, Figma, Miro, and Trello.

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Project overview

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Commercial real estate is a global market of $22 trillion where 80% of it is refinanced every three to five years with an almost completely manual process that can take 3-9 months and has to be repeated every single time.

The Lendhaus's clients are large real estate investors, global banks, real estate agencies, and law firms. The end-users will be CFO, Treasurer, Asset Managers Commercial real estate is a global market of $22 trillion where 80% of it is refinanced every three to five years with an almost completely manual process that can take 3-9 months and has to be repeated every single time.

 

The Brief

The Lendhaus wanted to design a simple way for borrowers to put out a "request for quote" (RFQ) tender for loans for single or multiple properties. 

Once the RFQ has been accepted by multiple lenders, they needed a simple way for borrowers to review and compare loan proposals, which can be complex with a variety of numbers (interest rate, term, etc.) and covenants (loan to value ratio, interest cover ratio, etc.) and text from legal documents.

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Goals and objectives

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As the design team, we focused on the right parts of the project and identified which areas need to be addressed. 

Design process

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Empathise

Methodologies

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Competitive Analysis & Market Research: Reviewing the competitors to the Lendhaus was exciting but yet it helped us to familiarize myself with Lendhaus brand and the commercial property industry. It was a great chance to learn their strengths and weaknesses. 

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Market & Industry Research : Once I had a research plan in order, I wanted to learn and understand the trends and best practices in the commercial property industry market.

Interviews

 

We were able to interview industrial leaders who are having over 30+ years in CRE. The purpose of these interviews was to get an understanding of what commercial real estate was and what would happen when a borrower requests a quote for a new loan.

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Key insights

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• The majority of users compared different banks with the best rates and fees.

• Users suggested negotiating and price match with the banks for a better deal.

• Users valued a strong relationship between clients and service providers.

• Users suggested comparing different markets and prices in the banks.

• Users expressed their interest to see more engagement and a seamless journey for the borrower on the platform.

• Users wanted to see the different terms and conditions individual banks had.

 

 

Persona Development - Tim

Based on the feedback and insights gained from research, I created one persona who might use the Lendhaus site. This persona demonstrates the key user goals and frustrations that appeared in research findings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim's journey map

For this project, we focussed on the borrower's perspective and Tim's main flows included preparation, finding lenders, analyse and compare, deal execution and complete the process.

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Define

Project Strategy
 

After analysing the data collected from the primary and secondary research done earlier, My self and the team started to build out a list of the most important features the app should have. I put together a product feature roadmap of any features that might be needed for the app to work efficiently and meet the high-level goals and objectives of this project.

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Ideation and creation 

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The team conducted a co-design workshop with the client to generate and pitch ideas. This ensured that the client's voice was heard, and had a personal stake and say in how the product would be developed - allowing for a balance between user needs and business wants.
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We used the following How Might We's questions to frame the ideation:

 

• HMW reduces the waiting period of Tim until he gets any response from the lender?

• HMW guide Tim end to end of the process without friction?

 

After conducting the co-design workshop, It was time now to think of how users might navigate the app to request a loan and compare loan proposals. It was important to keep the information architecture as simple and concise as possible.

 

User flow

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Before we started sketching and building out wireframes, we wanted to figure out what the user flows would look like for customers trying to accomplish specific tasks. Therefore, the user flow was created which was mapped to determine how to navigate through the website.

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Prototyping and user testing 

So this process had two iterations – each was subject to user testing and further refinement.
The initial prototype is a mock-up based on our existing research, the key themes discussed in the ideation workshop, the wants and needs of our persona, and the user flows. We've meshed this together to craft our first draft of a prototype – Iteration 1

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Iteration 2

It's much the same in terms of layout with limited functionality but clickable areas which presented the interactions and navigation possibilities.

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High Fidelity prototype

Most of the necessary design assets and components developed and integrated to test usability and identify issues in the workflow.

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Lessons Learned

Finding the right participants for the survey and real users to test to understand their usage daily was a challenge.  

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What I Would Have Done Differently

This was a really challenging project for me because the initial understanding of the project was lacking from the beginning. As a team, we did a greater and fruitful job in the end. But from my perspective, I would have been formed a good foundation for the user flow and the process.