Improving Home Building& Buying Journeys
Role
Product Experience Designer
Focus
Service design, UX research & experience strategy
Industry
Home building & real estate
Platform
Internal tools and customer-facing home-closing experience
Overview
A home-building company serving a variety of lifestyles needed a more consistent way to manage home buying across divisions. The work focused on bringing role-level visibility to the internal process while giving customers a simple way to track their own home closing.
Mission
Align the people and touchpoints involved in home closing so the process is easier to run internally and easier to follow externally.
- Establish an end-to-end home-closing process and make its cross-functional interactions visible.
- Analyse regional differences and create a more consistent internal process.
- Empower Concierges and New Home Consultants to meet home-closing goals.
- Create a clearer, more reassuring closing experience for home buyers.
Process & timeline
01
Discover
Initial research
User interviews were the primary research method, helping us understand a day in the life of each participant: their roles, responsibilities, and involvement in the home-building process.
Deep dive
We mapped the frustrations and challenges users faced with existing systems and processes to identify where the experience was breaking down.
02
Define
User personas
Personas clarified who we were designing for. They captured the personalities, behaviours, goals, frustrations, and tools used by the primary stakeholders in the Lennar environment.
Problem statement
Empower cross-functional teams with a transparent system, while allowing customers to track and stay on top of their home closing.
Fragmented systems made daily operations difficult for Concierges and New Home Consultants. The opportunity was a connected platform with actionable insights, milestone nudges, and integration with existing systems - alongside a customer view of progress, milestones, and dependencies.
User journey map
Ecosystem map
The ecosystem map surfaced the stakeholders, resources, touchpoints, and dependencies that shape a customer's home buying journey and contribute to the closing process.
Service blueprint
Information architecture
We created a mobile experience for customers to track their home-buying process, and a web experience for Concierges to manage exceptions, meetings, stakeholders, and overall home-closing progress.
03
Design
Concierge workspace
- Insights and metrics for active customers, pending exceptions, and weekly closings.
- System-generated action items arranged by priority.
- Upcoming meetings, shareable resources, and a personal note-taking space.
Closing calendar
- Phase and timeline views to track progress, requirements, and priority action items.
- An overview of active customers organised by closing date.
- Community-level distribution of customers and homes.
Customer app experience
- A virtual assistant for customer questions and support.
- Current-phase progress, recent construction photos, and milestone to-dos.
- Chat with assigned associates and updates on upcoming appointments.
Key learnings
Design around real people
Putting users' needs, expectations, and preferences at the centre of the process is essential for a seamless, intuitive experience.
Make room for individual needs
Personalisation and customisation can make a complex process feel more relevant and manageable for each person involved.
Treat mobile as part of the experience
Mobile optimisation matters when people need to check progress and stay informed away from their desks.
