Coded Agents Redesign
Coded Agents is a mobile app that helps connects Home Agents to people who are looking for homes to buy or rent for a perod of time.
2021
Type - Housing
Role - Product Designer
Platform - Mobile Application, Website
Brief
Housing is one of the issues that people have had a hard time to find a solution to, and this is where coded agents comes in. A lot of housing agents have houses for rent, short let or sale and have no place to upload information about these houses to prospective tenants or their fellow agents except with the use of social media. Coded Agents provides a community where you can upload all the information of the property on the platform and even sell it there without having to leave the platform or post on social media.
The challenge
- Redesigning the existing app into something that is easier to use and more visually appealing.
- Making the flow much more easier and transparent than what was already existing therefore increasing more user sign ups and more house sales.
My Role & the team
I worked in a design team of three here as the lead product designer on this product, I spear headed product design efforts which included reworking the sign up flow, sale flow and choosing new color schemes to use on the product.
Research & User Experience
For this product we realised agents werenât utilizing it properly and will rather use social media to pass accross their information, so we were able to ask quite a number of agents that had signed up on the existing app why they werenât using it and also asked agents who hadnât signed up what they want to see in a product like this. This is how some of the interviews went :
Joshua Folarin
Agent
Mr Joshua signed up on the app when it launched in 2020 but he dropped off after using it for two months and these were his reasons why :
- He didnât think the app was easy to use
- He didnât think the app was good to look at (bad UI)
- Communication with other Agents and potential buyers wasnât as seamless as he expected
Rachel Omoleye
Agent
Ms Rachel had a similar experience with Mr Folarin, she signed up and dropped off after some months too, her reasons being :
- The app wasnât for her
- She couldnât upload pictures of the houses she was selling
- The Filter feature was âbrokenâ and she felt it could be more seamless and helpful
Key Motivators
- Existing app doesnât help them achieve their main goal which is; posting the property they have for sale/lease and connecting with fellow agents and customers seamlessly
- To be able to post all specifications of the house needed
- A platform that connects them with fellow agents that can be of help to them
- A platform that is easy and seamless to use
Existing App
Visual Design
For the visual design my team and I thought it was best to give the
users a different look and feel, which entailed going away from the
primary colors of pink and purple used in the existing app, doing a
total rebrand with primary color orange
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Get Started
On this screen, you sign up with your details i.e name and password, this is basically a welcome screen, once you get through this screen with your details you can start posting your property you have for sale.
Listings
On this screen, you see a list of all the houses that are for sale or rent on your network and you see the details of the houses, the agent responsible for said house and also pictures of the house. From here you are also able to contact the agent whether by sending them a message or by calling them.
Post a Property
This screens show how properties are posted on the applicatiom, you can post either as a âBuyerâ or as a âSellerâ and from here you add the necessary details about the property i.e the type of property, number of rooms, bathrooms etc. you can also add photos of the property, which is something you couldnât do on the first version of the product that was shipped.
Filter
The filter screens enable you to be able to curate your search experience by streamlining the kind of properties you are looking for, price range, the usage of property i.e whether for residential or commercial, the filter just helps for a user to be able to just search specifically and see property they might be interested in, it is also possible to save your filter and go back to it later.
More Visuals from the project
Challenges and Takeaways
One of the main challenges my team and I faced in revamping the product was to be able to design a product that makes it easy for the user to solve their problems which is post a property and get a buyer, with the previous app this wasnât achieved and there were a lot of drop offs, but with this app we made sure to reduce drop off and increase usage we had to make it as simple as possible for the user, and convenient enough for them that they donât have to leave the app to achieve the main purpose, we also made sure they could be contacted easily via the app.
Conclusion and Outcome
The product is still in the beta stage, but the plan is to roll it out in phases to validate and get user feedback, and iterate before releasing the final version of the app.