Sarah Biggerstaff, a prominent Austin real-estate agent and I were connected to meet for coffee and talk about the design of her app. We discussed her mission at length and then quickly became focused on her idea to connect real estate agents to home professionals such as plumbers, roofers, and handymen. Sarah and I collaborated for a short three-hour design thinking session to kick-off the project.
START WITH THE WHY.
This exercise builds alignment on the fundamental goals of the business to serve as guiding principles.
TARGET PERSONA
We use personas to keep people at the center of our focus. As we are designing the product as a team it is paramount to continually ask, “Does this match with what we know about people?”
Zena Shupe
- Female, 28-45 Years
- Austin, Texas
- Defining Traits:
- Self-motivated
- Creative
- Enthusiastic
- Values:
- Responsiveness
- Efficiency
- Work-life balance
- Challenges:
- Commission based earnings
- Non-commital clients/providers
- Saturated field of competition
PERSONALITY SLIDERS
Visually align on broad aspects of the business so that everyone involved has a shared idea of the brand look and feel.
STORYBOARD
Identify an effective means of allowing realtors to connect with service professionals that other members of their realty network may have interacted with.
Then we went into production mode.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
After the workshop, armed with Sarah’s brilliant ideas and the assets we co-created, I was able to quickly mock up a high fidelity prototype for Sarah to use in validating her product-market fit.
Check out the interactive prototype below.