Think real estate, and new technology might not immediately spring to mind, but as Zandre Coetzer, UX Designer at Leadhome explains, a great user experience (also known as UX design) is helping Leadhome customers buy and sell property faster and more efficiently than ever before. “You wouldn’t think that there are so many steps involved in selling a property: booking a valuation, taking photos, listing the property on portals, putting up marketing boards, facilitating viewings, negotiating a good deal, transferring property legally, and finally moving in. Every step of this process needs to be orchestrated and handed over from department to department.”
So, what does a UX designer do? In a nutshell, they’re concerned with the entire online customer journey, including aspects of research, visual design, information architecture, usability and prototyping. The user experience approach is about truly understanding the problem a user has before creating a solution. In other words, UX design is the process of designing (digital or physical) products that are useful, easy to use, and delightful to interact with. “Our job day-to-day consists of interviewing customers, analysing statistical information, mapping out customer journeys and visually designing products or services that best serve the customer. We work with developers and operational managers to deploy these ideas and test them in the field,” says Coetzer.
This customer-centric method has enabled Leadhome to combine the very best of people and technology to pioneer the transformation of residential property transactions for both buyers and sellers. “These technologies are what enable us to manage large volumes of listings with a 5-star service and 31% faster selling rate. The products our tech team experiments often sounds like it is science-fiction, for example an AI-driven technology that predicts whether a property is likely to sell based on its current condition in the market.”
Coetzer says that one of the more interesting developments on the horizon is how artificial intelligence will soon enable a new generation of real estate products such as automatic valuations and automated marketing of properties based on where the right buyer is likely to be. He adds that the beauty of UX design is always being curious and genuinely interested in what customers want. “We ask “Why?” a lot. “Why do my customers need to sit and wait for a property to be sold? Why can’t they have it right now? How can I make that happen?”
