Designing consumer-facing products for home buyers and internal tools for the Opendoor operation team.

My Journey & a Home Buyer's Journey

Designing for a real estate startup for two years, I have grown more than I could have ever imagined. Apart from the excitements and the evolutions of a startup, the home buying design domain lets me further develop my practice. These are the knowledge that I’ve learned from getting familiar with a very regulated real estate industry, and the experience and confidence from solving complicated problems at a large scale.

While designing the home buying experience, I found myself no longer purely designing human-computer interaction or human-object interaction. In the past, I worked on more simplistic scenarios llike "mark a place on the map" or "use my phone to turn on the TV". I find the current scenario that I am working on, which is home buyers successfully move into their dream home, much more challenging than "browse home listings on web" or "save this home".

Not only does the overall home buying journey consist of hundreds of scenarios, but it also involves many relationships and touchpoints. A home buyer can work with an agent, browse web listings, physically visit a home, talk to a home-owner friend, inquire Opendoor's service via email, call Opendoor to access the home, compare and discuss homes with significant others, submit an offer, withdraw an offer, schedule an insepction, E-sign documents, scan and email documents, and more. Buying a home also includes many emotional moments. For most protential home-owners, buying a home is the biggest purchase of their lives. It can be stressful by the nature of its financial aspect. It is a monumental life event. 

Regarding such contexts, I now approach product design challenges in a more holistically way. I strive to connect the dots: different types of interactions, different formats of communication, the pixels on the screen, and each unique physical in-home experience.

Above is my journey at Opendoor.

Below Is a Home Buyer's Journey

I would like to use this journey map to communicate my projects, and how Opendoor helps home buyers find, purchase, and move into their dream homes.

My Advisor Tab

In-App Guiding Experience & Messaging

After iterations and incremental improvements, the mobile app buyer assist features felt randomly placed. These generic changes lacked the hand-holding feeling that usually comes from a real estate agent.

We’d like to provide clear next steps in a meaningful way to increase app user engagement and conversion. The better we can assist the customer, the more likely customers will use Opendoor in their buying journey. The goal of the my advisor tab in app is to increase engagement by guiding customers throughout the buying and selling journey.

Internal Buyer Admin

Internal Buyer Admin

Help the sales and operation team achieve business goals effectively

I lead design for features and frameworks across buyer admin. It is Opendoor's CRM. This platform organizes and visualizes the customer information, contextual insights and sales tools which help the team make day-to-day decisions. This platform consists of mainly two parts: Customer Page and Buyer Sales Index.

Customer Page

Customer Page organizes all customer data and customer events related information. It provides realtime SDR support, communication tools, and other sales related information like funnel management, CX assignment, organization participation, and referral relationship. (CX: customer experience, sales and operation team)

Buyer Sales Index

Buyer Sales Index visualizes the home resale funnel. Its main users are the resale customer experience team (CX) within Opendoor. This index enables the CX team member to view and manage all buyer leads across each stage, so that they can effectively triage and follow-up with the customers based on priority.

Offer Portal and Closing Dashboard

Improve operation efficiency with self-service features

Facing the challenge of increasingly high volume of resale contracts, we would like to create consumer-facing web products which are aimed at solving operation capacity issues. Design goals and approaches are as follows:

Operation excellence

Reduce operator’s task, enable self-service, respond to a high volume of resale contracts

Customer satisfaction

Deliver best quality service with technology tools

Resale Offer Portal

Resale Offer Portal enables agent buyers to directly submit an offer through a portal where they can give Opendoor key information and related documents. Previously, Opendoor resale coordinators spent 25-50% of their time viewing offers submitted by agents and entering pieces of information from the offer email to internal Admin. With this new offer portal, we saved our operation team’s time. In the future, this could be the portal where buyer customers can manage all the offers and negotiations for all Opendoor resale properties.

Resale Closing Dashboard

Resale Closing Dashboard, together with automated emails, guide agent customers throughout the closing process.  Previously, Opendoor Closing Managers guided customers through the process by email. Transaction information and requests can become scattered in multiple email threads. Documents need to be downloaded, executed, uploaded back to admin, and then emailed back to a customer. This process creates operator overhead. 

With the Resale Closing Dashboard, we expand our closing manager’s responding capacity by reducing our operator’s manual tasks and context switching. This dashboard is aimed to help Closing Managers continue to deliver quality service to customers despite a large number of ongoing transactions. 

Direct Buyer Closing Guide

Demystify closing by breaking it down to "what is it" "what we will do" "what you will do"

For a more in-depth view of my work, please get in touch.

I'd love to hear from you.