Redfin Redesign

UI/UX Design

Mobile App

Real Estate

Project Overview

This redesign project aims to optimize the real estate trading experience by simplifying the search experience, enabling users to find their dream homes and connect with compatible agents more easily.

Time
2023.09-2023.12

Role
UX Designer,
Researcher

Project Type
Team Project

Team Structure
UX Designer, Engineer,
Product Manager

Tools
Figma, Protopie, Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Why Redfin?

The inspiration is from my real estate content creater experience.

01 Inspiration

While working for a real estate agency company, I used Redfin, an app known for its extensive range of property listings, to find open houses.

Despite its comprehensive resources, I found its user interface to be redundant and there is a prevalent issue of trust among users regarding the agents listed on the platform.

So I would like to take the design challange to improve its user experience.

02 Redfin business model

Comparing Redfin to traditional brokerage platforms reveals that its win-win business model benefits sellers, buyers, and realtors alike.

03 Business opportunity

One obvious problem is though Redfin make profits out of commission fee, it's really hard to selet an agent for yourself.

How to enhance Redfin’s platform usage through property viewing process for users?
How to optimize information hierarchy to increase searching efficiency?
How to promote user trust in Redfin's agents, encouraging them for collaboration?

How do others perfom in the market?

Redfin is the top-ranking website for a full-service brokerage, but it's not in the top 3 of real estate websites (which are Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia)

Competitive landscape

According to Statista most popular real estate website/apps reportand our survey about the most frequently used real estate app, we analyse the strength and weakness of Redfin, Zillow and Realtor.

What do customers think of Redfin?

Several user research methods were used, from user observation to dirt research and surveys

01 Observation

First impression on Redfin

At first I noticed how people around me search for homes and found that they use Redfin only for its extensive listing resources.

02 First round of survey

Satisfaction research

We conducted a survey to understand users' satisfaction about real estate apps and Redfin. Over 100 participants took it on Usability Testing. We found that only 5% users are satisfied with Redfin app, which is much lower than the number of users who are satisfied with genearl real estate apps.

03 Dirt research

App Store reviews show us how Redfin users struggle with the app.

04 Second round of survey

What should a better real estate app be like?

A survey is created to understand the experiences and preferences of how users find homes.

Key findings

Visual exploration of properties and location-based searches are the primary areas where users spend most of their time.
Users have different preference of home values, but we can find a way to provide convinience to as many users as possible.
The process of comparing properties now is so frustrating.
Most users find it difficult to contact with a real estate agents through the app.

Who are the current and future users of Redfin?

From primary to potential customers, Redfin mobile app users can be divided into 3 groups based on their real estate investing experience.

Demographics of real estate market leaders

According to Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report, Despite Gen X and Young Boomers leading the real estate market, a shift is underway with Gen Z and Millennials gaining influence, the latter group showing a marked preference for conducting real estate transactions via mobile devices while in-person agents are still needed.

Primary target users, new adapters, and potential users

After 50+ user interviews we created three personas by identifying distinct user needs and behaviors within the real estate market, focusing on a sophisticated investor, a first time homebuyer, and a home browser, each with unique goals and platform interactions based on there experience.

How do we optimize its flow for users above?

There are solutions for all the searching experience, browsing experience and deciding experiences.

Current user flow

Searching, browsing, deciding are all very complicating and tedious, user have to set many values while searching, and keep scrolling up and down to browse the property information until they find what they're looking for, choosing agent page is really hard to reach.

What a hedache.

What additions and subtractions should we do to Redfin?

We conducted 20+ user co-creations to figure out their preferences of current Redfin user experience and their expectations for a refined one. And we analyse the impact and effort to take of each movement, then set our priority for this design sprint.

Refined User Flow

Now, regardless of different goals, a prompt-based search engine guides users, with suggested text prompts directing users efficiently to the options that best suit their needs.