Command Mobile App Research

Background

Keller Williams is the world’s largest real estate brokerage, and for the past 5 years has been on a journey to transition to a real estate technology company. For this project, I worked with the product development team tasked with developing a native mobile app version of Keller Williams’ proprietary Customer Relationship Management software, Command.

My Role: Lead User Researcher and Research Strategist

Objectives

• Enable human-centered design at KW with data-informed insights

• Explore the problem space to inform product vision

• Evaluate a previously developed but abandoned alpha build of the app to determine directional alignment with vision

• Facilitate iterative design testing to understand advantages and risks

• Evaluate the late-stage design and beta releases to ensure good UX quality before general launch

Research Strategy

I lead a small research team (3 other researchers) to conduct studies across the development process of Command Mobile. Our first step was to explore the problem space to discover user needs, use cases, and pain points related to using Command while on-the-go. Our goal was to provide the Product team with the insights they need to develop product strategy and vision, and to prioritize feature sets into a successful product roadmap.

 Phase 1: Problem Exploration

Methods: Interviews, Focus Groups, and Surveys

Goals

• Understand user needs, pain points, use cases, and expectations for a Command mobile app

• Evaluate competitors and existing solutions/workarounds

• Provide insights to develop detailed product requirements and roadmaps

Selected Insights

• Real estate agents can spend as much as 80% of their workday away from their desk.

• There were many gaps and pain points in existing on-the-go working experiences.

• Users’ mobile needs centered around viewing and updating the contact records in their databases, communicating with clients, and managing the tasks they need to do.

 Outcomes

• Prioritized which persona we would focus on: Solo and team real estate agents

• Prioritized the core experiences to focus on:

  • Lead management (viewing and managing contact information of their database of leads and customers)

  • Communication and tracking

  • Managing tasks and to-dos

  • Nice to have: Voice commands

• We determined the alpha build of a previously developed but abandoned app was inline with our strategy enough to use it, accelerating our start in the design and building process.

Phase 2: Concept & Design Testing

Our design testing focused around the most key experiences that agents needed access to on-the-go. With research supporting the decision to start with our previous alpha build as a beginning framework, the first task was to test this build with users, then add the layer of our new design enhancements and additions.

Methods: Moderated and Unmoderated Usability Testing, Concept Testing

 Goals

• Evaluate the usability of the alpha build application, and identify and categorize UX issues

• Iteratively test our design ideas to determine best design direction

• Understand advantages and risks for each design

Selected Insights

• The alpha build app met our usability standards overall, with a few usability improvements identified

• Users responded very favorably to the areas of focus we chose for our product vision

• Users needed more visual hierarchy on the dashboard and other places to indicate task/notification priority

Outcomes

• List of UX and usability improvements prioritized by severity to incorporate into the roadmap

• Enhanced product vision statement and requirements with more data

• Iterative design refinements to increase confidence and ensure quality UX before beginning major engineering work

Phase 3: Beta Testing

With detailed designs in hand, engineering could begin building upon and improving the mobile app. Our research team developed a beta testing plan to evaluate features and experiences as they were ready to be released to a limited audience.

Methods: Moderated and Unmoderated Usability Testing, Interviews, Surveys

Goals

• Evaluate the usability of each experience in phases as they were released to the beta instance

• Identify and prioritize usability and UX issues, developing recommendations for resolving them

• High-Level Learnings:

• The beta release was mostly well-received, with a few issues identified to resolve before general release or within following releases

Outcomes

• Each phase of the beta release passed UX standards and was approved for general release

• With collaboration from Product, Design, and Engineering, roadmaps were updated to incorporate improvements identified

Phase 4: Launching Command Mobile

Command Mobile has been considered one of most successful product releases that KW has had. Being tied so closely to important user needs and key user experiences, and backed by a wealth of high-quality research data, it serves a core role within the KW product ecosystem and fills a significant experience gap that existed previously.

Now KW agents can easily and conveniently facilitate real-time communications with clients, record and monitor important business insights, and manage and complete their most important tasks regardless of where they are.

For more information about Command Mobile, see this article and promotional video.

Ongoing Research Strategy

With Command Mobile launched to general audience, a primary component of our research effort centers around monitoring the user experience to ensure we are meeting standards and to gather data to guide product enhancements and additions. This includes product usage monitoring and qualitative feedback.

Next steps

• Continue bolstering our data maturity to include deeper insights to evaluate users’ core experiences

• Launch in-product satisfaction and UX check-in surveys

• Continue cyclical discovery, definition, and evaluative research per product and design roadmaps