Redesigning home buying and selling

Settled are a prop-tech startup who’s mission is to make it simpler and quicker for people to buy and sell homes. I led design for a future-state service for them.

Design lead • Research • Product design • Service design • UX/UI

The brief

Design a future-state service proposition, that reduces the time it takes to buy or sell a home, and design a mobile-first journey for home sellers.

Approach

Settled had a big vision, which started with the question: what if it could take weeks instead of months to buy or sell a home?

I had to look at their current-state service and come up with a workable solution that would make it much quicker for their customers to buy or sell their home. This involved utilising emergent technology and envisioning new ways to enable faster home sales.

I mapped out Settled’s existing customer journey and also researched existing home buying and selling journeys in the market.
I researched ways we could reduce the time it took to sell/buy a home and how we could integrate technologies, such as digital ID checks. I then used this to design a future-state service blueprint.
Home Passport was a strategic concept we developed, with the purpose of reducing time and uncertainty in the home selling/buying process. The first iteration of this was creating a purely online journey for customers.
I designed customer journeys for both buyers and sellers, including onboarding, home visit booking, document upload and ID checks.

Mapping the current service

I mapped out the entire, end-to-end, customer journey, that Settled customers currently took, for home buyers as well as for home sellers.

I also interviewed the customer service team to find out what the key pain points were for existing customers.

This enabled me to see where there were opportunities to improve the current service for both buyers and sellers.

Section of the ‘As-Is’ service blueprint

Future service blueprint

After researching all of the third party providers needed in the process (Land Registry, ID checking, solicitors, etc.) and understanding the processes that were currently used, I then designed a ‘future'-state’ for Settled’s service.

The objective was to reduce both uncertainty in the process as well as the time it took to complete a home sale or purchase.

Home passport

Our initial goal was to streamline the existing, slow, postal-based process of submitting required information to sell a property, by moving this all online, we could see that Home Passport could eventually become a digital profile for all properties, containing relevant data such as structural changes and surveys, conversions and boundary changes. It would also be accessible to home buyers.

The Home Passport concept had the potential to radically reduce the amount of time it takes to sell a home, and reduce a lot of the uncertainty too.

Home Passport could be used as a way to fast-track home sales, as it would contain a lot of information that is either hard to find or take a long time to obtain, slowing down the home sale process. It would also, crucially, reduce uncertainty for home buyers, which is a big pain-point.

Home owners would add information about property changes, for things like damp coursing, extensions, loft or basement conversions, any structural or boundary changes. It could also include data from the Land Registry, as well as structural survey reports.

Home Passport data could also, potentially, help property price evaluation, if the data sources can be suitably verified. It could act as an always-on, property value-tracker.

Onboarding & journey design

I changed the existing seller’s onboarding journey, so that we could get a home visit booked asap, and then get the seller started on their Home Passport.

As part of the new online journey, we integrated digital ID checking, using Onfido, and made it as easy as possible for customers to complete all steps using either desktop or mobile devices. We knew that home sellers would complete the Home Passport over multiple sessions, so it was crucial to make it easy for them to be able to stop and then pickup and continue again easily.

Outcomes

I designed a radical, future-state that we could add to a roadmap for future improvements to Settled’s service, and designed a new, mobile-first way for home sellers to add all of their property data, online.

I designed a future-state service blueprint that Settle could add to a roadmap for future improvements to Settled’s service.
I designed a new, mobile-first way for home sellers to add all of their property data purely online, including digital ID checks and document upload, saving time and making the process much easier for customers.