RealMassive's DataQu is an emerging CRE data brand that provides its users with real-time data, driving better business decisions. Users are able to apply a variety of filters in order to drill down to the data that they need the most, when they need it the most. RealMassive is on the verge of a major product announcement that will drive toward their top KPI and provide relief to the industry drastically affected by Covid-19.
Design an ecosystem centered on the idea that data should democratized to help build better business relationships within the commercial real-estate industry. This is an ongoing project.
The commercial real-estate industry is woefully underserved by its data providers. With limited options and often outdated and unverified data at premium prices, the industry needs a partner that will learn from and support them throughout their careers. RealMassive believes that data should be available to everyone and wants to design a system where data can be shared, enriching the industry that they support.
Focusing on attracting users as it's main KPI, RealMassive is dedicated to providing solutions for the problems facing its user base by creating a product suite that will become a "destination" for commercial real-estate professionals across the country.
Commercial real-estate professionals including Brokers, Investors, Developers, Appraisers, and Lenders. There are hundreds of thousands of people working in the commercial real-estate industry in the United States, relying on the same outdated data to make decisions that will impact an industry that generates over 900 Billion dollars a year.
CRE professionals are generally over the age of 30, conducting much of their data collection and behind-the-scenes work from their offices on either laptops or traditional desktop monitors. They would log in to DataQu to compare data with other sources, create comp reports, find contact information, and learn about any historical information like transactions and taxes. They are often juggling multiple properties and tasks so they'll need a way to manage their workflow more efficiently.
In order to meet the needs of our users, we decided to focus on building a SaaS based platform centered around our robust database, releasing features in an agile environment that supports this idea. Our team focused on three major product releases: DataQu Table View, DataQu Filter Panel, and DataQu Detailed View.
Once we had our product idea in focus, we began to work on curating an optimal user experience, beginning with mapping out how the user should flow through our system. The goal here was to create as little friction as possible for the user while providing the full breadth of our database. The user flow below shows a high-level pathway for navigating DataQu and reflects features that are already in production or being defined/developed by our team.
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After spending some time ideating and white-boarding with our product team, we moved right into hand-sketching ideas and creating medium-fidelity wireframes in Sketch. Having created a detailed design system early in my tenure, we found it to be a faster and more efficient way to meet the timelines set for us by our business entity.
One of the benefits of early digital wireframing is that we can then use the Sketch+InVision tools to get feedback from users as soon as possible. This critical feedback allows us to iterate quickly, refining the product to the MVP, saving critical Engineering and QA hours on the back end of our cycle. Once we were satisfied that we'd addressed any issues or friction for users, I completed the visual design and presented the prototype to our business entity for final feedback before handing off our work to Engineering using the InVision prototyping and inspect tools.
We needed a way to present the right amount and kind of information at the highest level to our users. Table View provides an accurate overview of the properties in our database while adhering to common usability heuristics and design principles.
Arguably the most important piece of the puzzle, the filter panel allows users to filter through almost 30 Million properties, down to the exact properties that they need for their research. By incorporating elastic search into our backend, users are able to find this data in fractions of a second. For MVP, we decided to include the features that we thought would bring us close to parity with our competitors. The goal was to offer our users a seamless transition from a competitor's product while protecting our own brand standards.
With over 100 points of data to display, the Detailed View is where users are able to access the data they need, including advanced property information, active listings associated to the property, ownership contacts, transaction and finance information, and tax history.
I am currently working on an integration with Pendo, a product experience platform. This will allow us to track user behavior and study trends based on user segments. In addition, we've integrated the Zendesk platform with Pendo, giving our users a direct link to our customer support team. We are also launching the Pendo Feedback feature that will provide our users a direct link to becoming involved in our feature development process. By accessing the Feedback Portal they can submit requests as well as track and vote for their favorites.
Future feature ideas include an updated dashboard, analytics, a data ingestion tool, as well as updates to the three core products discussed above.
