Viewings Manager

Project overview

With a whopping 2 billion consumers visiting Rightmove each year, the B2B2C have decided to explore new revenue streams aiming to grow business amongst their huge consumers’ audience. I delivered an MVP to monetise consumers for the first time. The MVP is the backbone of Rightmove’s longer marketplace vision: to offer a richer experience to home movers across the country via a marketplace where users can manage all their home related needs.

How I worked

I built this project from scratch working from the strategy throughout its launching and iterations. As the design expert, I was in constant cross-functional collaboration with internal stakeholders (Analytics, UX Researchers, Marketing, Ops, Account Directors).

From MVP to the “ideal experience”

We had to ship fast, but also ship to learn. Our MVP had just enough features to be considered “working”. We made it available to only 17 customers (out of 2,000) in Bournemouth and Yorkshire. I monitored and worked closely with this customers to learn how to evolve the product. At the same time, I had a “behind the scenes redesign” project, where I would focus about 25% of my time on refining our existing product without being bogged down by limitations. Anything was on the table in this “ideal experience” I would leave it in the backlog and allow the designs to evolve slowly.

Research

Before starting to design anything, we needed to align on the problem space, needs, challenges, target audience and opportunities for both - our users and the business’. “Quan” and “qual” data helped to identified assumptions, hypothesis and gaps in the knowledge.

The users

We focused in the Lettings space as it was less risky and aligned with the company OKRs. That allowed us to narrow our efforts into a core audience of Lettings agents (inc. Student lettings agents).

Research goals and initiatives

To map the rental process: steps, tools used, softwares, exceptions, needs, motivations and painpoints we spoke to 7 agencies and 17 participants across all agency types.
To understand the agency’s set ups across different Agency types: - “Single” v “Multi-branch” vs “corporate agents”. “Fast” vs “Slow moving property markets”. And “Separate admin staff” vs “All-in-one” - I traveled the country to interview agents and managers from 10 agencies.
To learn how viewings are handled and processed, I listened to over 30 calls between agents and property seekers requesting a viewing.

Workshops

From establishing research goals or the project vision, to insights analysis to ideation sessions or feasibility, I run and participated in many workshops. Workshops is the heart of design and innovation

Insights driving the design decisions

🏡 70% of the leads sent online are viewing requests.

💬Agents (but also consumers) struggle to have conversations at their convenience.
🤑Agents cannot prioritise leads efficiently: they either have too many leads or not enough.
🤑Agents are not responding to enquiries quick enough
🤑The soft vetting of an applicant is an integral part of the agent’s viewing process
🤑💬Agents believe that vetting the applicant’s suitability early in the process is one of the most important part fo their job. Now this is done through offline interactions.
🏡💬Agents want written confirmation of their offline interactions with applicants to help them keep track of their progress.
🏡💬Agents feel like the answers they need from renters are not, typically covered by a yes/no answer
💬Sometimes the opinion an agent has of a renter could overwrite a bad referencing result
🤑Agents take great care to make sure landlords trust they will deliver trustworthy, suitable tenants. The landlord is the real person of interest for them
🏡Organising the logistics of viewings is a pain. Even though agents feel like doing the viewings is part fo their role, they feel that organising the logistics around them is taking more time than it should.
🤑Agents have real security concerns about conducting a viewing with an unknown person
🤑Agents find dealing with problematic references/renters as business as usual, the real risk is jeopardising the trust of the landlord in the quality of tenants they bring

Project Goals

Three pillars:

🤑Richer Leads: Enable agents to prioritise and respond to their leads in order to make them more efficient.
🏡Rightmove Plus: Increase dependency on Rightmove's tools and staying relevant
💬Better comms: Making communication between consumers and agents simple and convenient

Success measures

Real time bookings
Increase usage of our tools
2,000 Letting agents using the feature
Reduce lead response time from agents
Reduce time from enquiry to offer

Principles

Provide just enough value to customers
Deliver as soon as possible
Comfortable with failing and learning from the experience

Ideation and Validation

A “thin slice” flow and the three pillars (“better communication between agents and applicants”, “richer leads” and “appointment bookings”) became the ideation’s pillars.

Based on them and the business goal - increasing Rightmove Plus’ adoption - I created early-stage prototypes to test my assumptions and to evolve the ideas quickly.

Challenges along the way

It wasn’t plain sailing but we took off without the “perfect design”. Here are the biggest challenges I faced:

Not seeing the full picture

Thinking about the hypothesis in the early research phases, we realised that we needed to include the renters’ because they are the one initiating the conversations and are at the end of the phone. To move forward we felt that we needed to speak to them. It was time consuming but extremely beneficial

Complex systems and fragmentation

Unlike in other industries, in Real State there are hundreds of tools used by agents to lock in offers. From low-fi processes like pen and paper to hi-fi custom made CRMs. This made hard to prioritise what would deliver the most value for our users.

Lack of design system

Rightmove Plus has a distintive dark mode, but beyond that there is not a design system per se. So instead of “waisting time” building out buttons and components, I worked backward from there. I focused on building flows and delivering UI designs that became part of Rightmove Plus’ design system in the making.

Not changing behaviours

Although the product is used and liked, our stats showed us low adoption: more than 50% of the agents prefer to arrange a viewing via the phone. We’re embracing this behaviour and also exploring solutions to drive the adoption of this feature from the consumers’ side.

Business’ centricity and innovation resistance

In retrospective, overcoming this it was my biggest achievement. As the design expert, trying to balance Rightmove’s centricity against our users’ needs was the biggest and longer standing challenge. A few months into the project I realised that our target audience had their ways of working. To success we needed to respect their existing methods and systems and develop features to compliment it rather than against it. To overcome the business’ resistance, I patiently involved my team in my creative process so they could participate in the discoveries rather than just following management decisions.

Launching

In abril 2020 we released to 17 agencys an experimental “Viewings Manager”. A few iterations and releases later we got to a well-performing baseline. Fast forward a year and we have achieved over 40% of our 2000 agents target and counting. We know we are far from our 100% target but the foundations are in place. We are gathering valuable data, optimising the journey, and introducing other core features. However the real game changer is integration. Integration with our clients’ solutions will enable us to future proof our ecosystem, making it easy to scale, adapt and adjust as business requirements change.

Afterthoughts

For Rightmove to influence further the rental process there are several areas that we need to improve:

Landlords’ relationships: we need to help agents to strengthen their offering to landlords and to improve their relationship.
Cross-selling: we need to help agents to offer property seekers better matches. As it increase time-on-site, Cross-selling can be beneficial for Rightmove too.