Habito Plus Dashboard

Habito  |   Mid 2020

Overview

In early 2020 Habito launched a new premium service called Habito Plus. Building on the already free mortgage service, Habito Plus bundles together the legal work and property survey also required to buy a home for a single fee. Habito Plus as an idea rose from the ashes of another product called Habito Go following a team Design Sprint.

What Habito Plus solves

Most of the pain, stress, and time in the home-buying transaction is in the later stages of the journey known in the industry as 'completion.' In this phase, customers typically feel overwhelmed in dealing with lenders, solicitors, surveyors, and brokers. Most of this process is still manual across the industry, making it frustrating to find out what's happening with your case in real-time.

Habito Plus aims to reduce this frustration by assigning the customer a Case Manager who looks after the customer's application from start to the end. They'll arrange everything on behalf of the customer, check for updates and relay them through the Habito platform.

The objective

Habito Plus successfully launched in 2020, and we were beginning to see the signs of product-market fit with low to no-build solutions. The main aim of this project was to deliver on the promise of Plus with a product experience that lived up to customer expectations.

UX outcome:
To create a new product experience that allows customers to feel more informed, in control, and less stressed about their case.
Business objective:
To reduce the effort involved in servicing a Plus customer by delivering more updates digitally rather than through manual processes or intercom.

Core hypothesis

We believe that…
by allowing customer to see what’s happening with their case digitally through their customer dashboard

they will…
feel more confidence in knowing what’s happening with their case and have less need to reach out for individual updates

We’ll measure this…
by the reduction in messages sent via intercom to Case Managers, sentiment surveys and NPS scores

Initial investigations

The first port of call for me was to understand the completion process at a high level. I was primarily focused on who interacts with who and what the key moments are. This flow was the result of a whiteboarding session with the Product Manager.

I also needed to understand how we were integrating Juno, our conveyancing partner. Similarly, with TheMovingPortal, the platform we used to find chartered surveyors on behalf of our customers. Below are flow diagrams produced from whiteboarding sessions with the Product Manager and Operations Lead.

Target users

Our primary audience for this project was residential homebuyers who had signed up to use Habito Plus. These were customers that had also applied for a mortgage through Habito.

However, I also needed to design for customers that had not signed up to use Habito Plus. They would also get the same dashboard experience, just with fewer updates.

The third user of interest and critical stakeholders in the project was our Case Managers. I needed to understand how they worked and their key actions when servicing a Plus case.

Qualitative research

Case Managers @ Habito

I met with 4-5 case managers to understand their workflow and process on regular cases and Plus cases. I was interested in the types of things they were hearing from customers throughout a case.

Habito Plus Customers
We used existing insights from a recent round of research on why customers decided to use Habito Plus. From this, we were able to understand their mental model of the proposition and how it met their expectations. During the execution phase, I ran usability testing with 4 more customers.

Legal Counsel @ Habito
We also sort the expertise of our in-house legal team to understand more deeply how the conveyancing process works from their perspective. Having the ability to ask lots of ad-hoc nitty-gritty questions over the course of the project was a real godsend during this project.

Customer research findings

We conducted user research with 5 Habito Plus customers who had completed their home purchase in the past three months.

Our in-house User Researcher led these sessions with the broader engineering, product, and design team as observers.

Aim of the research:

Get behind the scenes and understand the situational context leading to the decision to buy Habito Plus.
Learn more about the barriers in the process and how they relate to the Plus offering
Identify any flaws and gaps in the service and therefore opportunities for improvement and further evolution of the Plus product.

“Plus is basically the surveyor and solicitor sorted for you, that’s it really. It is the core service, which you have to pay for anyway so why not get someone else do it.”

Participant 4

Themes from user research
All in one place
Our customers know that Plus is not the cheapest option on the market, but it's the prospect of managing the whole process in one place that's appealing to them.

Perception of pain
Completion is where most of the pain happens in the home-buying process. Customers have often heard horror stories from friends and family, and the language and content we use help alleviate these fears.

Calms fears
The proposition is attractive because it addresses first-time buyers' main fears of things going wrong; the language and content help alleviate these fears.

Competitor research

I researched several other digital solutions that help customers keep track of their home purchase during the completion phase. I presented these to the product crew, and together we critiqued what worked well and what didn't amongst them.

Main highlights:

Juno conveyancing

Juno are our main conveyancing partners that handle Habito Plus cases.
Clean dashboard design that provides all the high-level case updates but little extra detail or educational material.
Clarity of what the customer needs to do next and what the case is waiting on.
Weekly email to say whats happened or changed over the period.

Premier Property Lawyers

Another more historic conveyancing partner to Habito and one of the biggest in the UK with ~40% of market share.
Fully-fledged, all-encompassing platform covering all aspects of the completion process such as document management, guides, searches log.
Case manager/solicitor activity log to see what was happening in a more real-time way.
Timeline/Wheel interface to show what was happening as a more linear process
UX/UI functional but a little outdated

Redrow

Property development company specializing in new builds
Good balance of high-level overview of the steps with deeper information to learn more. Strong sense of progression along a path to the customer goal.
Steps were staggered over phases with rough timescales (more predictability is possible with a new build where searches are done prior to development)
Takes advantage of the 'dead zone' where the customer has little to do by upselling other services and amenities such as Sky TV/Broadband
Features a simplistic document management section

Mapping the process and context

It was time to go much deeper into the customer's journey to shape the new experience. The below map is part traditional journey map and part service blueprint where the fundamental actions of all the actors are detailed.

I compiled this map by working closely with Case Managers & Legal Counsel. Customer research interviews gave more insight into the emotional ups and downs of the journey.

I now understood the core milestones of the customer journey in much greater detail. These moments were then translated into a series of updates that could be packaged and delivered to the customer. In each moment, I mapped the direction of the communication and the steps within the moment to give even more detail.

This became an essential document for the engineering team to refer to as we progressed into the build.

Team ideation and prioritization

To gather input from the wider team and align on the direction for our new experiences, we collected input and ideas asynchronously through a Jamboard then used affinity mapping to categorize the results together.

We later used several 2x2 matrices to organize and prioritize our ideas. We used Value x Desirability to get a more customer perspective and what features may be most desirable and help sell Plus. We then used Effort x Impact mapping to get a feel for what would be most feasible for a Minimum Viable Product.

Defining our MVP

For the first version of the completion tracking dashboard would focus on delivering simplistic updates to the customer dashboard and creating a foundation to build on in the future.

Simple customer updates for all the core milestones in completion
Surfacing granular updates based on existing events and logic but no new updates
Signposting to external partners but no deeper integration

Inspiration gathering

With our scope well defined, it was time to start thinking about solutions and the interaction design. I was interested in task management dashboards and interfaces that feature timelines along with a complex task.

Wireframe concepts

I devised three potential approaches for the dashboard design;

Concept 1: Timeline

A simplistic timeline that groups milestones into broader stages

Focus on explaining whats happening in bunches so the customer can follow the stages
Detailed breakdown view of what happens in each step within the milestones
Scalable, easier to add more milestones/steps over time

Concept 2

Clear explanation of what everyone is doing/needs to do

Handles parallel tasks and moving parts better than concept 1
Latest message from Habito at the top of the page
Keep track of documents in one place

Concept 3

Visualizing the process of what happens when

Sets expectations about all the moving parts
Zoomed out view of the overall process with granular updates as they happen
Latest communications pinned to the dashboard

Concept development

Following multiple rounds of stakeholder review and design critique, we settled on concept 1 as the best direction to pursue due to the simplicity of the design.

This was a foundational step towards a bigger and more complicated universe of conveyancing. Around this time, leadership decided to embark on building out an internal conveyancing team.

We aired on the side of simplicity while we learned more about the conveyancing process as a business. Leaving us room to build a more sophisticated experience later

Usability Testing

A round of remote moderated usability testing was conducted by myself with the aid of our user researcher. We recruited 4 participants who had recently used our Plus service.

What went well

**Level of information**

Participants felt they had the right amount of top-level information for what was going on. They liked that links were provided for more detail too.

**Progression & celebration**

A clear and consistent system to show progression as well as moments of joy on completion brightened up what they felt was a long and daunting process.

**Case manager updates**

Participants reported this would make them feel more at ease with their case and feel less need to actively reach out for updates themselves. Not an MVP feature.

“This is great for first time buyers like us who don’t understand the process”

— Participant 1

“We like to check for progress and see things go green, it feels like we’re getting closer, it’s such a long process we love those quick wins”

— Participant 4

What didn’t go well

The majority of the negative comments or areas for improvement were more related to the peripheral experience with the Habito or Juno service.

It would be helpful to separate completed milestones from outstanding ones.
Frustrating to receive documents via intercom chat (e.g. surveys)
In reality, some events happen outside of the order presented in the timeline.
Habito experience is great, but most of the pain sits with the conveyancing partner, whose service we can’t control.

“Obviously things can happen in any order, our offer came through immediately after the survey”

— Participant 2

“We always want to know. Right! What’s the next task!? I’m not sure how you’d do that but that could be an improvement.”

— Participant 3

Visual Design

Habito went through a company rebrand around the time of this project which meant I later had to revisit the initial designs and re-skin them in our new Phatasmagoric branding.

Summary

Measuring impact

Each case is unique and carries unique complexity, so it’s tough to quantify the change that this new dashboard drove in terms of core metrics.
Plus cases typically receive twice as many direct messages from customers as regular cases due to the length of time and the number of milestones we manage.
Some features, such as receiving email updates, were not available in the initial release. This is something that could have drastically improved the need to reach out to the Case Manager.

Qualitative feedback from Hotjar

Survey question: How could we make this page more useful for you?

Positive feedback 🙌🏼

“Not sure how this section could be improved, everything is set up well.”
“It’s be great to be able to connect directly with our advisor/case manager here.”

Pain points / bugs 🚩

‘tighter integration with Juno for Habito+ service (not having to login again)”
“Have chat automatically scroll to the last message instead of the first. Have to manually scroll every time I enter chat.”
“some updates are not showing“ - We discovered that when a customer needs to resubmit their mortgage with another lender some milestones were not being updated.

Ideas for improvement 💡

“see files I've uploaded”
“Tell me what has changed since the last time I was here”
“Maybe put a star or highlight the box when something new has changed.”
“Include timescales/dates for each section (even just 'this typically takes 3-5 days' gives an idea”
“A bit more granularity around all the steps (complete and incomplete) would help provide context. I know a lot of this lives on the conveyancing side though...”

What happened next…

Extensive service and process mapping of the case management workflow to make efficiency improvements.

Internal conveyancing team launched in Q3 2021. Giving Habito more control of the experience.
Integration with a new conveyancing tool and next phase of customer milestones to be added for the customer dashboard.