Client

Real Estate Investment Expert

Date

December 2022

Services

UXD, Web Design

Deliverables

Website Prototype

Prototype

View

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The Project

Real Estate Investment Expert (REIE) has a variety of information on various aspects of real estate investment. They provide an excel spreadsheet tool with estimated cashflow of an investment property, but many users are confused about how it works even after they're taught how to use the tool.

I redesigned this excel spreadsheet into a discreet, interactable cashflow calculator to improve learnability and usability.

The Process

Research & synthesis
Initial designs
Feedback
Iteration
The final redesign

My Role
UX design & research

Kickoff

This project began with a meeting with my stakeholder. He walked me through the calculator tool and the reports that he was using: an excel spreadsheet, emailed to the user, that would produce a two page report. He then showed me a mock up he had put together for a new calculator and explained that he wanted to move away from the excel tool and wanted the reports redesigned as well. With a clear understanding of the scope of the project, I was ready to begin evaluating the original calculator tool.

Heuristic evaluation

During my evaluation of Real Estate Investment Expert's (REIE) current cashflow tool, it became apparent that learnability and memorability were low. The columns and instructions were confusing. There was also a lot of industry terminology that was left unexplained and no clear way forward. I was able to produce a report after viewing a tutorial video; however, I was unable to produce a second report without re-viewing the tutorial - a major pain point.

‍Opportunities

With the initial evaluation completed, I identified several opportunities for improvement.

Increase usability of tool by simplifying the process
Increase learnability of tool by defining jargon
Improve user experience via visual design update & interaction design

‍

Research

Competitive analysis

I then compared the mockup that my stakeholder provided me with 3 competitors' tools to better understand what was missing from the new design.

Findings:

Learnability levels were low with every competitor. There was nothing available on any site that would help explain what jargon meant or what values were fairly standard across reports.
A high level of cognitive load was present in every calculator tool due to the large amount of user input required.

Ideation

How might we...

increase the learnability and memorability of the cashflow calculator tool?
decrease incomplete form submissions and user drop off?
increase user satisfaction with reports?

Thanks to my research, my goals became clear.

Redesign cashflow calculator to simplify the process
Reduce the cognitive load on users by adding clear steps
Provide progression indication as users continued through the process
Simplify report and increase scannability

Initial designs: calculator

Here you can see my initial design. With the calculator being integrated directly into REIE's website, users no longer need to download the tool and run it in excel. I designed this tool to be a multistep process in order to reduce the cognitive load on the user.

This design was quickly iterated. I added numbers for each step, as well as visual refinements. Although my stakeholder did not provide a style guide, I adhered to REIE's color palette, current interaction design, and styling as much as possible.

From here, I designed an info bubble to provide additional information for terms that a user may be unfamiliar with, and began building out the rest of the pages of the tool.

Initial designs: report

My initial design was centered around simplifying the existing report to be more scannable.

After initial feedback from my stakeholder, a pie chart was added to visualize the information and the design went through five more iterations to refine placement of information and visual design.

My stakeholder said the key indicators on a report were important and needed a more obvious callout. The final design for the report highlights key indicators clearly, and has scannable breakdowns of various operating expenses.

Save report

I was asked to add a small popup that allowed the user to save both the standard annual version of the report and a monthly version of the same information.

Final design

Next steps

I then passed this design file off to our dev team to build for the live version on the Sacramento Investor site.

Chris (tofu) Benning

Cashflow Calculator