2019 began with a significant challenge. I was contacted to research and collaborate on a platform for buying and selling properties. It was a project from scratch with the challenge of overseeing the research, ideation, definition, and design process.
Discovery
Understanding the business
We began by collectively understanding, researching, and defining the initial MVP version of the product. Since we were entering an industry with a highly developed market, one of the first processes we undertook was Customer Journey mapping of the conventional process to identify key pain points. This way, we gradually discovered and defined our working hypotheses and the product's value proposition together, utilizing tools such as benchmarks, interviews, surveys, etc.
Empathize and define
Setting common expectations
We grouped all the functionalities into different categories, then scored each one on aspects such as development cost, user impact, market differentiation, profitability, and maintenance cost. This way, we made the functionalities measurable in order to vote and prioritize them. Finally, we decided which ones would be our core functionalities, or "Must Haves" (MH), which, in other words, are the top priorities for business, technology, user experience, and product. With this list of priorities, we iterated on various product architecture proposals. Meanwhile, in parallel, we validated our hypotheses through surveys and interviews with the user personas we had identified in previous workshops.
With everything we learned from our users, we adjusted the product architecture and refined the user flow and navigation. We gathered qualitative data through interviews, identifying patterns, use cases, and common pain points. This information was crucial for crafting more insightful surveys to quantify, measure, and validate our insights.
