Defining experience strategy at StreetEasy
StreetEasy lacked Product, Engineering, and Design alignment on how we should support our agent users - resulting in a piecemeal experience. To address this, I crafted the Agent Experience POV alongside Product Management with the intention to guide product work over a three to five-year time horizon. Using in-person interviews with agents, design and product tenets, and existing primary research, we identified where we wanted to focus and how we wanted to serve agents using StreetEasy. This work created clarity and cohesion since its completion and has aligned the team around common goals.
My tasks
Pulling themes from in-person interviews, distilling these themes and primary research into design tenets, and recommending near- and long-term projects that could move the agent experience from where it was to where we believed it needed to be.
Other people’s roles
UX Research: Ty Mangum | Product Management: Emily Capuano
Results
A strategy for how all designers will support NYC agents, rooted in known agent behavior and needs.
Company alignment on how we will address agent needs.
Faster product decision making.
Agent interviews focused on known jobs to be done
Zillow has identified the primary jobs to be done for agents - and they are just as true in New York as in the rest of the country. But we wanted to understand how they were done by NYC agents, especially NYC agents within the Experts Program.
We recruited and conducted interviews with ten NYC agents, focused on understanding how they source and manage leads, create listings, and build their business.
Insights
Agents use tools that show their expertise in the NYC market to help them differentiate themselves and display their value to buyers.
Agents crave efficiency when it comes to managing multiple leads and clients
Agents want to understand as much information as possible about leads so they can have a strong first impression
Finding support in primary research
Some of these problems had been identified in existing primary research at StreetEasy. I pulled these themes forward to better understand how we might address them in our product, and to save our team from doing further primary research.
These themes helped us identify five tenants that we would use to decide what types of projects to prioritize moving forward, and how to execute on them.
Tenets
We iterate on features strategically. This is important, because traditionally StreetEasy has not iteratively release product - opting instead for large design investigations and releases.
Our experiences need to be tailored to the unique role that agents play in NYC - where a single deal in a co-op can make the difference in getting a client.
Our design solutions need to prioritize efficiency. We enable & guide agents to work smarter, faster.
Lean on the quality of our data. Agents, buyers, and renters trust our listings and our data.
Everything should ultimately support successful transactions. We support agents in making deals happen.
Visualizing for now and later
I wanted to show how these tenets could be used to make product decisions, so I created speculative designs rooted in real agent user problems. Using the tenets, I showed how we could support them with work immediately, and how that work could evolve to more complex solutions. We used these ideas to align the org on a high level roadmap for agent related work.
Final takeaway
Each of the projects outlined above have been prioritized, designed, and built since the inception of this artifact. Because of the user focused work that informed it, the projects have meaningfully increased agent engagement with StreetEasy tools - leading to more advertising, and more engagement with our referral program.