Intuit TurboHome FSBO software
A TurboTax-like online experience to sell homes without paying for an agent
Overview
Client: Intuit
Team: Software engineer, software engineer intern, and myself
My Role: As the only designer on my team, I was in charge of all the design work. I did the UX and visuals (iconography, illustrations). All members were involved in the research, ideation and interviews.
Background: How can we put money back into people's pockets? Going through many ideas, we stumbled into the home sell market. Most people hire an agent to help them buy and sell homes. Agent commissions on average are 2.5% of a home sale; That's a lot of money. However, some agents are not very proactive and are not able to sell the home in a short period of time. How can we prevent people from getting a bad agent? Is it possible to sidestep the agent and sell a home for sale by owner (FBSO)?
Solution: Online software that guides people through the process of selling a home
Research
- What are the steps to selling a home?
- What do agents do?
- What do people expect agents to do?
We interviewed people on their home selling experience and people in the industry (a real estate agent, real estate attorney, real estate broker). We created journey maps to understand their emotions throughout the process.
Journey map of someone trying to sell her home
Journey map comparing a good agent, bad agent and FSBO
Whiteboard sketches of user flow
High fidelity mockups
Invision link: https://invis.io/BE3OAG5VX
Website
We built a marketing website in a day to showcase the benefits of TurboHome. I designed in the browser while the engineering intern coded the back end.
Product pitch to customers
Interviewed and pitched TurboHome to 12 people who were thinking about selling their home but didn't sign with an agent yet. 10 out of 12 people said yes, this is a product they need. We found that our target audience is men over the age of 35, usually who have sold a home before. The two people who said no were women, first time sellers. They wanted an agent to hold their hand through the process.
3 people we pitched TurboHome to
A slide from our presentation to higher ups
Pitch to higher ups
Besides pitching to consumers, we needed the company to gain the support of higher ups within the company. We created presentations to persuade high ups in the company that TurboHome is an excellent business move and Intuit should definitely be developing a product like this.
Feasibility
We felt that TurboHome has desirability so we moved into feasibility. We found a man on Craigslist who was been selling homes in the Bay Area FSBO for the past 40 years and tagged onto his journey. We followed him to see what he does to successfully sell homes and to see where we can automate the process. Unfortunately, this was at the end of my internship so I'm not sure what happened with Bob.
Takeaways
- Lean experimentation
- How to create and run user studies
- How to pitch to higher ups