Project Type
Saas Dashboard
My Role
User Research, Product Design, UI/UX
Duration
3.5 Months (Sponsored Studio Porject)
Team
Me, Arushee Thakur, Dhruva Sharma, Harshesh Sayani, Mansi Kadam, Samiksha Pawar, Viola Kuo, Zhanqi Li
What is Ylopo?
Ylopo is an innovative real estate technology startup specializing in empowering real estate brokerages, teams, and agents to enhance their revenue and operational efficiency. They use cutting-edge digital tools to help real estate teams and agents attract and nurture potential home buyers and sellers so that they turn into home sale transactions.
What is Mission Control?
Mission Control is a digital marketing dashboard that lets real estate teams and agents create and manage ad campaigns. There are 5 types of ad campaigns displayed on the Mission Control platform. The campaigns differ from each other because of the marketing purposes and marketing channels.
Who are the primary stakeholders?
Real Estate Agents:
They help homeowners find buyers and vice versa by using different marketing methods and their expertise of the real estate market. Their income comes from a percentage of the house sale price, called a commission. To maximize their earnings, agents want tools to easily create and manage advertisements for the houses they are selling.
Team Owner
Agent
Agent
Agent
Real Estate Team Owners:
They manage real estate agents and take care of all administrative work. They are the ones who purchase Mission Control for running and managing advertisements. Currently, only team owners can access this dashboard to handle ad campaigns and see how they’re performing.
Introducing Agents Access
A new mission control which lets agents create, run, budget and manage ad campaigns.
Improve Interface Design
A visual rehaul making the existing platform more intuitive, accessible and scalable.
Future-proof Navigation
A scalable platform ready to accommodate new feature additions
Streamlined ad creation
Making the ad campaign creation process faster by reducing nested windows and pop-ups.
Personalized ads
Introducing custom images to allow agents to represent their personal brand the best.
Why is this a problem?
Team Owner
Spends excessive time on ad creation, despite it not being part of their role.
Is not in contact with the house seller or aware of their needs.
Real Estate Agent
Do not have the autonomy to create and budget their ads.
Cannot track performance and make adjustments to their ads.
Allow agents to independently fund and run their own ad campaigns
Make the dashboard scalable and intuitive
To create an agent's dashboard, we began by exploring the team owner's Mission Control to identify the tools and features available to them. This platform, indirectly used by agents, served as our starting point. The team conducted a thorough audit of the platform to evaluate its strengths and areas for improvement.
To deepen our understanding, we decided to conduct primary research to observe how stakeholders currently interact with Mission Control.
The request the team owner to run their ad
They use it to launch ads
13
stakeholders interviewed
Semi-Structured
interview method
5
different teams interviewed
150+
Insights collected
Interview conducted on zoom
Figjam file of insighst collected
All
agents want the control to modify and pause campaigns directly
All
agents want the immediate access to any lead generated
70%
agents want to add their own images to the ads
55%
users find it frustrating to contact finance team to add/change payment method
Pain points > Opportunities
The pain points identified during the interviews revealed key areas for improvement and opportunities to enhance the dashboard.
While the four insights mentioned above represented the primary takeaways shared by multiple interview participants, we also uncovered numerous pain points and feature suggestions that significantly expanded the scope of our work. As this project was part of our curriculum under the Studio Project course and spanned only 4.5 months, we had to strategically narrow the focus. By scoping down and prioritizing key features, we ensured the delivery of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) within the timeline. All other features and suggestions were documented for future consideration.
Campaign Creation
Campaign Insights
Budget Information
Play and Pause ads
Streamlining ad creation process
Lead details
Save Payment Details
Control over Campaign
Building on insights from the interview and the features we derived from it, we explored various layout options. Our initial round of ideas were paper sketched which were then iterated upon and taken to Figma for digital wireframes. We conducted usability testing and evaluation with stakeholders and iterated upon those before jumping to high-fidelity designs.
Low Fidelity Sketches
Digital Wireframes + Iterations
Usability testing on Zoom
The team developed a brand-new design system to enhance the portal's accessibility and scalability. Why? An audit revealed significant design pattern inconsistencies, leading to usability issues. Moreover, scalability was a key goal, making it essential to create a system that could seamlessly accommodate new features without concerns about design patterns or component consistency.
Navigation
Before
Horizontal Navigation
The existing navigation functioned adequately but posed scalability challenges for the portal. Its limited space restricts the ability to accommodate new features effectively.
After
Vertical Navigation
Shifting from a top horizontal navigation bar to a side vertical bar to make space for any future pages or features. Introducing nested links to retain any page hierarchy.
Campaign Listing
This page is the landing page for the dashboard
The first section of this page is the launch section. It allows the agents to run campaigns for selected properties instantly. The goal behind this was to encourage agents to run more campaigns (business goal).
The second section is the list of all active and inactive campaigns.
Defining data points on campaign listing table
After
I re-thought the information displayed on campaign listing tables. It was tricky to decide what information is displayed on the limited real-estate of the table. The first six columns are all different data points which were essential to help an agent differentiate between ads (since they might run multiple ads for same property). The last six columns are budget, performance and actions.
Before
Campaign Creation
The team enhanced the campaign creation process and enabled users to seamlessly switch between different campaign types during setup.
We restructured the process into steps, and added a new feature to upload custom images.
Before
The current campaign creation process takes place within a pop-up, which confines a large amount of information to a small space. This results in many smaller functionalities being overlooked or underutilized since they are easily overlooked in a cluttered layout.
After
We gave campaign creation a page of it's own and restructured the workflow into four clear steps, reducing complexity and making each phase less overwhelming for the users. Additionally, we allowed the user to preview the template in the same workflow.
What's New?
An option to upload custom images allowing real-estate agents to personalize the ads.
A campaign confirmation page which can be revised from the list of campaigns.
Notifications
Notifications were relocated to the top-right corner, aligning with industry standards for better visibility and accessibility. Additionally, agents can receive notifications via email and SMS, ensuring they don’t miss any leads.
