When Folio was first released, it allowed agents to create a simple transaction timeline, from the moment an offer for a house was accepted until closing.

This led agents to perceive Folio as a helpful tool for working with buyers, but its value for agents working with sellers was unclear. We wanted to change that, and expand the value of the timeline for listing agents and their clients.

The product at that point was side agnostic, and we wanted to see if there’s a way to modify the existing product to provide value to both sides of the transaction, without a complete overhaul.

At the beginning of the project, we wanted to identify:

• Pain points, needs, and delightful moments for real estate agents during the listing process.

• What are the important milestones, dates, and tasks?

• What information do agents share with sellers?

We began by talking with real estate agents to better understand the listing process. We co-created a journey map of that process together to understand pain points and magic moments of listing a home for the agent and client.

Above are the journey maps created by participants for the listing process. Happy moments go above the line and painful ones below.

We identified three phases with key dates that all agents went through when selling a home. We'd later use those key dates in the UI to start agents in the right phase when they created new listings in Folio.

Next, we wrote up a happy path for creating a listing timeline from what we learned during research and shared it with the team before designing a prototype to validate the concept in the next round of research.

After the team came up with a happy path for creating listing timelines, we made a quick prototype to validate our ideas with a new set of agents before we started to build. We wanted to make sure our key dates and phases made sense to agents and to see if agents valued sharing this timeline with their clients.

Above: It only takes a day to quickly mockup basic ideas in Invison so we can validate those ideas with agents before building.

We use Trello boards to keep track of research participants and to store insights if we want to come back to it later. We also use this information to write up short reports after the research round has ended.

Each round of research was lead by my design partner and me. We invited product managers, engineers, and other collaborators to listen-in to interviews and to help take notes. After talking with 6 participants, patterns usually emerge. We use sticky notes to keep track of those patterns and synthesize all the learning at the end as a team.

After the final research round, we identified the must-haves for release so we could get this out quickly.