Project Details:
Length: 4 Months
My Role: Senior Product Designer
Platforms: iPhone, Android, Desktop
Background
Compass is a premier real estate brokerage firm in the United States. They have a network of over 20,000 agents, operate in 44 distinct markets, and oversaw $91.2B in sales volume in 2019. These figures put Compass in the top 5 of real estate brokerages in the US, and the fastest growing brokerage with over 100% YoY growth. They focus primarily on Luxury real estate and are headquartered in NYC.
Compass views its technology platform as the driving factor to its success. Its agent platform provides some truly innovative and industry-leading solutions, such as a business tracker that allows agents to manage deals from initial contact to close, a marketing center to create beautiful Instagram and Facebook ads in 1 click, and more. Compass believes that by building the best technology platform in the industry, they will be able to grow revenue by making their existing agents more productive, and by attracting more high-quality agents to Compass.
Compass brought me on for a 6 months engagement as a Senior Product Designer to help build their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. This involved working quickly on a variety of projects, but one of the most significant initiatives I worked on during my time there was Compass SMS.
Research
As with any good digital product initiative, the genesis of this project was research. I was lucky enough to have a great UX research team to help conduct studies with our agents and generate insightful competitive analysis. This research helped to guide our approach and allowed us to confidently prioritize features that would provide the most end user value.
What we found was that agents love communicating over text message. As a matter of fact, SMS was their number one way of working with their clients! We found that, particularly in a hot market where a listing can go up Thursday night and be gone by Saturday, being able to communicate in a way that was fast and easy was of the utmost importance. In addition, we also found that forcing agents to send text messages off platform led to a subpar user experience in other areas as well. For example, our client activity feed would notify agents that they hadn’t spoken with a client in a few weeks, which wasn’t true, as they had been communicating with them over text during that time.
From our research, we concluded that adding SMS functionality to the CRM would provide significant value for agents. We found that agents expect a mobile-first approach and needed it to be easy to send messages from wherever they are. They also expect rich platform integration, such as easily sending listing collections, and automated text messages based on action plans.
Ideation & Iteration
Throughout this project, rapid iteration was key to building a product that delights our agents. We started by drawing some sketches of what this experience could be, without worrying about any of our real world constraints. This allowed us to think out of the box and explore the widest range of opportunities.
As we progressed through the ideation process, we started to bring together a cross functional team of experts to help inform our designs. This team included a product owner, a suite of front end and backend developers, researchers, and junior designers. With this collaboration, we were able to quickly present our ideas and gather useful feedback with very minimal overhead. This also ensured there were no “big reveals”, and that every member of the team was aware and could evangelize the general direction of our product to others within Compass.
Final Product
Below are some high fidelity Figma files of where we left the project. My involvement on this project concluded once the MVP experience was delivered and 2 development sprints had been completed. I am excited to see the value Compass SMS will be able to bring to agents, with an expected delivery timeline of Q1 2022!
Desktop
iOS
Android
