Investment Timeline and Dashboard
Roofstock is the first online marketplace created exclusively for investing in leased Single-Family Rental homes that generate cash flow day one. Created by investors for investors, Roofstock provides research, analytics, and insights to evaluate and purchase independently certified properties.
My Role
Product designer.
As a lead designer I owned the entire user experience of the product. My responsibilities included research, information architecture, wireframes, prototypes, user testing and UI design.
Goal of the Project
To create an interactive dashboard and timeline for investors, and to reduce time of closing a transaction through user education and support at every step on the conversion path. Present up to date information regarding the status of the transaction, provide overall description of all the steps, which investor has to go through in order to close on a property. Set up notifications and reminders of all the steps to be completed after the property is in contract. Clearly display transaction details, such as fees paid, purchase price and closing date.
Process
After getting all the product requirements set and meeting with project manager and kick starting the project I started by creating tentative transaction timeline and mood board.
Multiple coordinations with finance team and project manager lead to an extensive spreadsheet with all the steps of the transaction timeline, including describing each step in different states (upcoming, inactive, active and completed).
Next, user flows and low fidelity wireframes were presented to stakeholders and engineering team. Mock ups for every transaction step and outcome had to be created (different scenarios).
Extensive user testing was performed, involving new and existing customers, who already went through the process of buying a property. I created a number of clickable prototypes with different layouts to see how users interact with the dashboard. Major takeaway from testing was that users understood the next step and interacted better with the page when all the steps of the transaction were shown at once and as a list.
Final design based on feedback received from user testing presented to stakeholders. After the final design was approved I delivered the files and spec to engineering team.
End result
Once we launched the new redesign we got rave reviews from both the users and our finance team. Creating this timeline helped our finance team to avoid manually sending multiple reminder emails to the users, as well as cutting down on back and forth phone communications. The system was now automated and would send reminders and notifications to the user/investor for the overdue or upcoming steps they needed to complete. Investors loved it as well, since now they would have an overview of the entire transaction process from start to finish. All the information regarding scheduling inspection, appraisal, getting a lender for a loan or bank payments became accessible through this interactive transaction timeline.
