view project
☞
COMING SOON
Industry
Fintech, Marketplace
Duration
12/2020 - 11/2021 (11 months)
Role
Product ideation, UXUI solutions, Hifi prototypes, user testing, design handoff & QA.
Team
CTO, 1 product manager, 1 product designer, 1 FE engineer, 1 iOS engineer, and 1 BE engineer
The LEX core product is the cornerstone of the tech side of the business. The product and the experience should also educate our early adopters on the what and how of fractional real estate. We released the core product in two phases: an invite-only beta platform for early adopters, and a public launch that’s open to all users. By Dec 2021, the first month after our formal public launch, the product had acquired 12,000 users, 2,000 brokerage accounts, 800 funded accounts, and more than $2,500,000 in deposits.
With our waitlist product successfully launched, it was time to bring our vision to life. Before we proceed to the design, we worked together to identify the biggest business challenges and established three design principles to guide our product design decision-making.
Despite being one of the pioneers in the fractional real estate industry, with unique features such as real IPO, real liquidity, and availability for all, we faced competition from businesses that were already addressing similar problems with different approaches. It was essential for us to effectively communicate, and even educate, our customers about our unique value proposition and how we differentiate ourselves from others in the market.
As a FINRA-registered broker-dealer, we operate in a heavily regulated environment. This means that our account creation and copywriting processes are constrained by regulatory requirements, resulting in limited choices of product copywriting and longer onboarding flows. For a startup like ours, this could potentially result in a dropoff of potential customers.
Our customer base includes all kinds of investors. Due to resource limitations, we couldn't create customized products for different customer groups like Coinbase and Coinbase Pro. As a result, our product had to cater to both retail and experienced investors. Striking the right balance was crucial, as the product couldn't be too simplistic or gamified to discourage experienced investors, nor too complicated to overwhelm retail investors. We needed to create a solution that would work seamlessly for all types of investors and make all of them feel welcome.
Understanding a commercial property as an investment requires processing a vast amount of information, ranging from location and facade to asset details, tenants, managers, and financial performance. Presenting this information in a way that's easy to navigate and comprehend for all investors posed a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we employed a two-fold approach.
Firstly, we categorized the information based on the necessity and complexity, and classifying it as three categories, pinned, essential and advanced. Pinned information are the ones that’s sticky to the screen and always available to the customers. Essential information, necessary for understanding the fundamental concepts of property investment, is prominently displayed at the top of the page and accessible to all users. Advanced information, ones that need decent investment experience to process, is put at the bottom of the page, presented in a research tool hidden behind tabs to avoid overwhelming beginner investors while remaining accessible for experienced users.
Additionally, we prioritized the goal of guiding customers towards making an investment by placing a clear and prominent call-to-action (CTA) card for investments as a sticky element on the page. As browsing behavior can vary, we ensured the CTA is always visible and accessible, regardless of the user's stage in the browsing process.
However, we realized that the essentials alone may not provide a comprehensive idea of the deal to retail investors. To address this, we decided to further refine the information available to them. We took some of the advanced information and summarized it into a single tab in the research tools. This way, retail investors will have exposure to a simplified, summarized version of the advanced information, which will be set as the default tab of the bottom tabs. Together with the essentials, this will create a more complete view of the investment, providing a better experience for our users.
The research tools is a feature of the PDP that provides advanced information for more experienced investors to understand everything about the investors.
The research tools include advanced information about the operation, management, and financials of the property. It’s sourced and processed from all kinds of documents by our deal team. For the best interest of our investors, it’s our responsibility to make sure that any change of the property details is updated promptly on the platform. However, due to the complex nature of the information, our product team faced challenges in translating the documents into our research tools, requiring involvement from the deal/sales team and adding an additional layer of complexity to the updating process.
We initially relied on the deal team to take the lead. They would handpick the relevant information from the documents and share it with me, who would then design and implement the updates in our research tools.
However, because the deal team couldn’t directly visualize the information they chose, they needed every small change to be visually designed and built for them to visualize, resulting in excessive time spent on the visualizing and reviewing process. As a lean startup, this diversion impacted our ability to achieve other objectives and slowed down our business progress.
Clearly, this problem was rooted in the absence of tools and framework to guide the updating process. There were no guidelines on what information to include or exclude in the research tools, how much information to incorporate, and how to effectively represent each piece of information. Hence, I proposed a different approach.
I thoroughly analyzed the past iterations of research tools and standardized the formats for visualizing information. I then designed a system of four main components (text, card, key stats, tables) with 20+ variations, creating a comprehensive toolkit.
I introduced a new workflow for updating the research tools. Leveraging existing Figma tools, the deal team can now directly visualizes the new information they collect using Figma. Once they are internally satisfied, they pass the final Figma design to me (the design team), and I update the changes in the Webflow components.
With the adoption of this new framework, most updates can now be seamlessly implemented within the pre-built framework, saving substantial time. As a result, our research tools updating timeframe has improved from over one month to just one week, representing a remarkable 75% improvement.
The decision to create a dedicated trading view was an intense debate among our team. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of how much overlap between the current Property Detail Page (PDP) and the potential trading view, we decided to take apart the customer journey on the page.
The customer journey for trading a property share on LEX can be divided into three main scenarios:
❶ For customers who haven't invested in the property yet, understanding the property as an investment is crucial for making informed buying decisions.
❷ For customers who already own shares and want to trade, a thorough understanding of the investment is necessary to decide whether to buy or sell.
❸ For customers who have made an open trade offer, tracking the latest status of the open orders is important for making adjustments to their offers accordingly.
Comparing all these scenarios to the IPO process, It's evident that "understanding the investment" plays a vital role in customers' decision-making process. Based on this, we concluded that the trading view would essentially be an IPO view with additional trading functionalities. As a result, we decided to build the trading view based on the existing IPO Property Detail Page (PDP).
To provide visual differentiation between the IPO and trading property, we decided to pin the stock chart, a common element associated with trading stock, to the top tabs in the trading view. We also recognized this as the opportunity to educate customers about our status as a real stock.
The top tabs are thoughtfully designed in a modular manner, allowing for seamless switching between tabs without disrupting the current page layout.
The order book is a crucial tool for customers to understand the supply and demand dynamics and determine appropriate buying or selling prices. In addition to a complete order book in the top tabs, we also included a mini order book in the CTA card for quick reference.
To help customers stay informed about their orders, we added an "orders" section. However, to avoid cluttering the user interface, we chose to display only the latest three orders for all categories, considering that trading is not a frequent behavior.
Compliance requirements meant collecting extensive information during onboarding, which we were certain would result in huge dropoffs. Designing an engaging and efficient onboarding flow became a significant product challenge.
A design pattern we observed in most investment or brokerage products is that the whole onboarding is designed in a two-step approach. The first step is a simple sign-up that collects basic information such as email and phone number. The second step is the real investment account creation which collects more sensitive data, such as SSN, income, address, etc.
We viewed this as a strategic design, to first acquire customers through easy signup, then use the product itself to offer incentives to prompt customers to commit to opening a real investment account. We adopted the strategy to our own product and made our onboarding flow into two steps.
Then, we wanted to identify the incentives we could offer. These could range from tangible incentives like cash bonuses, specific offerings, a campaign, to more intangible ones like a sense of ownership or a sense of trust. By understanding our own incentives, we could better align our product design to effectively communicate these incentives to our customers. After several rounds of discussions, we identified several incentive opportunities within our product:
The portfolio serves as a key tool for our investors, providing them with a comprehensive understanding of their investments. To ensure an optimal design, we conducted thorough research on popular brokerage platforms such as ↳Robinhood and ↳Public.com . In addition to incorporating common elements typically found on financial dashboards, we have also decided to include geographic data visualizations, given that our investments are in actual real estate properties.
As part of our product development process, we sought feedback from friends, family, and enthusiastic users who were invited to our beta platform as early adopters. Through numerous usability tests and user interviews, we collected valuable insights and took detailed notes. We then analyzed this feedback, prioritizing issues based on their frequency and severity, to identify the most significant usability and product-related concerns that needed improvement in subsequent iterations.
The sorted notes helped us uncover key findings that guided our product enhancements:
Both beginner and experienced investors expressed discomfort and hesitation when asked about their net worth and annual income, as they were concerned about how their answers might impact their access to the platform. To address this, we revised our copywriting in the sign-up flow, consistently reassuring investors that LEX is open to the public and that their answers only affect their investor profile, without impacting their access to the platform.
Beginner users expressed uncertainty about which step they were in the deposit and IPO process, leading to feelings of insecurity. To address this, we divided the flow into smaller sections and added more educational interstitials between each section, providing users with clearer guidance on their progress in the process.
We also introduced a timeline section in our research tools to offer our customers a clearer understanding of the IPO process. This new feature guides users through the different stages of an IPO and provides them with information about their current position in the process.
Many investors expressed difficulty in finding the entrance to the brokerage account creation process after signing up. To address this, we improved our onboarding experience by adding more visual guides and prompts, including an onboarding checklist on the portfolio page and multiple visual cues that lead to the opening of the brokerage account flow on other pages.
After designing and refining our core product features, we were confident in inviting all users to our platform. In November 2021, we removed the waitlist and launched our product to the general public, making announcements across all customer touchpoints including social media, news coverage, email campaigns, and blog posts.
Thanks to the impactful marketing campaigns and the thoughtfully-designed product, our public launch was quite a success. Here are some highlights from the launch:
Check the ↳news of our 286 Lenox Ave IPO
This is the second case study of the LEX product series. Read more LEX product case studies:
↳ LEX Product 1/3 - Waitlist Product
Want to see all projects?
Check the ↳project index .