Realtair: Sign VIC Overhaul
Reinventing the way Estate Agents based in Victoria can manage their digital signing processes.
The goal of the project
Victorian Estate Agents have some pretty interesting complications and processes around generating contracts. A majority of the time, solicitors are involved and are drawing up custom format contracts, which makes it extremely difficult to be able to build a technical solution where signature fields and property details can be dropped consistently. Sometimes agents will deal with a single solicitor for their clients, or in more urban areas, they will deal with multiple on a daily basis, with every different bit of formatting, wording or information you could imagine!
My role
Lead the end-to-end design process, drawing up interview plans, conducting user interviews, building wireframes, lo-fi testing prototypes and building the final designs.
Discovery Interviews
During these interviews, we needed to find out how agents are currently using Realtair to manage their digital signing.
Figuring out what approach we needed to take in terms of a technical solution was crucial, but we were also aware of competitor solutions that relied on a support team to assist with tagging contract fields.
Discovery Interview Board
What we discovered in the interviews
I ran 5 of these interviews for around 45 minutes with the Product Manager for this part of the Realtair Product. We discovered that a few of the rural and smaller agencies used the standardised contract forms provided by the REIV, but a huge chunk of the inner city agents all used multiple solicitor contracts. This was backed up by a lot of feedback provided by our Customer Success and Support team, where it was a huge pain point for Victorian Agents having to use an older, and clunky solution.
Our main competitors allow agents to upload these custom contracts and they will then drop fields on to help streamline the process, but it is quite expensive as they pay per contract, and there is also no sort of main contract for multiple offers on a property.
We decided to implement an idea of ‘master contracts’ where we could have users get these processed once for each sale by our team, and avoid having to pay for multiple contracts for each offer. Another thing that was important to make this work, was to ensure that the UI and UX of the submission, approval and editing process was slick and really easy to manage.
Wireframes
After gathering all of the feedback and data from our initial interviews, I built out some wireframes to see if we could get a solid idea of what this feature was going to look like. It was really important to get these right before moving into the prototype testing stage, and we made sure we were aligning with the feedback we had also received through our support channels.
Prototype Testing
After the wireframes had been completed, I needed to run a second round of testing with the same clients, as well as a few others who were unsatisfied with our current offering. We wanted to make sure that the submission process, and the notification/approval process was going to be simple and effective for the agents.
The feedback that we received was extremely positive, and the agents thought that the solution we had designed is something that would add value to the product, and save them a lot of time throughout the contract process.
Hi-Fi Designs & Approval Prototype
After the testing had been completed, we moved into designing high-fidelity screens for the new feature. Our design system and wireframes gave me a pretty solid base to build the feature, but there was a lot of new functionality that hasn’t been used in Realtair before.
Key Takeaways
This design process was really interesting, it was great to be able to offer clients a solution that would help their day-to-day with digital signing, but it was also tricky in the way that we couldn’t get a proper technical solution sent across.
We settled on the process of giving agents a really easy and pleasant way to upload their documents, have our team drop tagging fields, and then allow them to duplicate these to send them out to any offers that come through. Ideally, it would’ve been great to have some sort of dev smarts identify certain fields and drop tags that way, but due to the completely different wording and formatting from each solicitor contract, this was pretty much impossible with our technical restraints.
All in all, it was a great learning process in the way of UI and understanding technical restraints, as well as thinking quite strategically. I also really enjoyed speaking to clients and getting some really in-depth information in this particular project, and it was great to have solid data to work with.