Approach

Objectives

• Execute a research study identifying the needs and pain points of Real Estate Portfolio Managers to inform a new UI design

• Validate and test UI concepts throughout the development process

Process

I worked with Product Management, UX Design, and my direct manager to solidify a research plan for the product. During our initial strategy meeting, we decided that the project would span two release cycles due to the lack of background research.

Generative Research

Secondary Research

My first step was to conduct background research on Portfolio Management to identify existing Portfolio Management software solutions and conceptualize more directed research questions for future user interviews. I reached out to Product Managers for reliable sources and conducted secondary research, which I summarized on our Miro board.

In-Depth Interviews

Participants: Current or former real estate portfolio managers; real estate industry experts

Goal: Build a picture of the responsibilities and goals of a portfolio manager to guide prototypes

Format: Seven one-hour semi-structured video interviews via Zoom

Due to the complexity of the role, I opted to conduct remote in-depth interviews to dig deep with participants and their backgrounds. I partnered with the product manager to define the ideal participant, then recruited through User Interviews, LinkedIn, and internal company connections.

Interviews spanned the course of about 4 weeks, and questions shifted as my understanding of the portfolio manager’s role grew. During sessions, I shared my Miro screen with participants and had them follow along, initially answering questions about their background and later seeking feedback on the customer journey map to ensure accuracy across multiple company profiles.

During my readouts of the customer journey map, the team provided feedback that they didn’t fully understand the portfolio manager’s process of evaluating a leased property versus an owned property. To help them distinguish these processes, I created an additional process map outlining the different steps of the leased and owned processes, as well as the places where they converge.

To build out our team’s empathy for the role, I also created a portfolio manager persona and isolated questions that they seek to answer throughout the process of evaluating properties within a portfolio.

Evaluative Research

Usability Testing

Participants: Current or former real estate portfolio managers

Goal: Evaluate feasibility of both low- and high-fidelity prototypes in accordance with portfolio manager responsibilities and goals

Format: Six one-hour video interviews via Zoom

As soon as the designer created sketches of the potential software structure, I began integrating usability feedback into user interviews. During early sessions, I shared the sketches and focused my questions around what information users would expect to see in each pages, as well as what fields and metrics were most important to their workflow.

Early usability feedback was positive, allowing the designer to jump into the high-fidelity Axure prototypes. During these sessions, I gave the users mouse control and allowed them to explore the Axure prototype, gathering their general feedback and then prompting them about specific fields throughout.

I summarized all usability feedback into sentiment categories (Positive, Negative, Neutral, and Missing) and broke it down by page to make it easy for the designer to refer back to feedback for specific views.

To help the designer prioritize usability insights, I also created a Kanban board to track progress implementing feedback into the design and promote active collaboration. I relied on insights from both users and product managers to guide priority of each insight.

Outcome

Findings

To help organize findings, I created a board with insights broken out into categories to help the team easily refer back throughout the development process.

In my quest to define the customer journey of a real estate portfolio manager, I identified a handful of elements that were crucial to an effective portfolio management tool:

• Critical dates such as lease expiration trigger property evaluations, and it’s essential that portfolio managers stay on top of dates to effectively leverage landlord negotiations

• Portfolio managers interact with various stakeholders throughout their company ranging from C-Suite executives to accountants. Each person needs to quickly find the information relevant to their goals within the dashboard view

• Portfolio managers need to slice and dice the data in many ways in their portfolio decisions, so the dashboard must be highly customizable and interactive

Impact

Although not yet in production, the Portfolio Management tool has already received recognition from senior leadership, Product Management, and research participants for its effectiveness integrating with other Nuvolo applications and capturing the needs of a real estate portfolio manager.

Reflection

What went well:

• Generated empathy toward the portfolio manager customer journey among both the design and product teams

• Collaborated efficiently with project stakeholders and applied feedback to research process

• Effectively illustrated portfolio manager interactions with other departments and tools