Getting $115MM in Series B Funding, No Sweat
Real Capital Analytics is a startup who came onto the Commercial Real Estate scene to fill an industry need to bring greater transparency to the CRE Investment Markets. By providing real-time data of capital flows and prices of commercial real estate properties, RCA garnered success across the globe with the help of active investors, lenders, brokers and advisors depending on their unique insight to formulate their strategies, source new opportunities, and execute their deals.
The Problem:
Having been in service to the CRE industry for a number of years, RCA had recorded over $18 trillion of commercial property transactions linked to over 200,000 investor and lender profiles, but UX rot and other growing pains were becoming more and more apparent. The current UX/UI had become an amalgamation of bolted on features with no rhyme or reason causing countless pain points for users and the business (high churn, high bounce rates, lowering retention and hindering conversions). Also as a need for more capital was increasing, the impact was beginning to be felt in their Series B Funding round with the company pushing towards becoming a victom of their early success.
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Our Role
As Principal Lead Product Designer, we handled User Research/Interviews, Persona Creation, Facilitation of User Journey Sessions and other alignment workshops, Information Architecture, User Flows, Wireframes, Design, Prototyping and User Testing
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Discovery
We started the process of going through this digital transformation by evolving the UX for the product and marketing efforts with current user analytics and then conducted potential, current and former subscriber interviews.
These were some of the key insights from this exercise:
- With the strong rebound in Commercial Real Estate Transaction volumes after the great recession, access to information to support investment decisions was viewed as highly critical
- Many prospects and lost customers acknowledge that RCA’s quality of data is better than their current source, but a disjointed customer experience was making it hard to find information.
- Based on current architecture and design, the pricing model did not scale to monetize growth in users / usage
- With the lack of intuitiveness exhibited by the current UX and UI, subscribers had difficulty easily executing analysis on the data and were getting lost in the mix of marketing initiatives in their user flows
- It’s current look and feel was mentioned numerous times as being dated and needed to become more contemporary in its UI, visualizations and adherence to current UX best practices.
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The Answer
After going through the process of analyzing the quantitative (Analytics) and qualitative (Surveys and interviews) data, the only answer was to rearchitect and redesign RCA’s offerings for scale. This meant:
- Design and Build a new Public facing touchpoint that was segmented off from the Main Product (Set up for marketing efforts and leads generation aspect of the business)
- Update branding and messaging that fit Real Capital Analytics current positioning and would also help them stand out to their target markets.
- Design and set up an App. destination to house a brand-new Web App experience for our users (Sole focus on current subscribers with a user flow to help them complete tasks and goals related to Commercial Real Estate Research and Analytics)
- Due to high information density of the CRE industry, users spend time viewing information or evaluating information to make quick decisions. So we had to find a balance where because of the lack of whitespace keeping things visually organized was paramount
- New Mobile App to become an extension of the new web app in the mobile context enhancing team collaboration and showcasing thought leadership with our publications offering
- New Internal Research Web App to complete a cohesive look and feel for our research staff who use these tools for inputting data into RCA’s information warehouses
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New UX Direction
In order to greatly improve our users satisfaction while staying in-line with the business goals we prioritized these tenets and deliverables to reach company goals:
- A new standalone public facing product that would allow you to log into the paid product and enhance opportunities for Leads through to conversions
- “Simple Elegance” was our north star for the web app which led us to a new clean look and feel. We get out of the way of our user and respond to them when called upon
- Users have to deal with a lot of variables in going through their user journey. We chunked tasks into bite size morsels so as to never overwhelm them on their way to completing tasks and achieving their goals while giving them needed and consistent system feedback when they made changes to their criteria.
- Users are able to customize their starting point within different areas of the app
- The Web App to become adaptive down to tablets
- Redesign mobile experience with new collaborative aspect
- New internal tools to help researchers enter data into the system
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Who Are We Aiming For
Based on the surveys we were able to distill three major users of the product to focus on:
Ben
Position: Commercial Real Estate Analyst
Company: Capital Partners
Age: 25
Goals:- Quickly survey the most recent transactions and pinpoint the most relevant comparables using a wide range of factors
- Understand all developments, sales, recapitalizations and financings of his current market
- Identify and rank the players in any market – true owners, developers, lenders and brokers
- Generate graphs, charts and tables that can be incorporated in any report
Janet
Position: Commercial Real Estate Broker
Company: Welfont Group
Age: 39
Goals:- Spot new players entering her market and build relationships with existing players by tracking their properties and transactions
- Enhance her presentations, pitch books and marketing collateral with custom charts, maps and graphs
- Generate broker rankings to show her dominant market position compared to her peers
- Prepare for her negotiations by knowing each prospective buyers’ holdings, recent deals and capital partners
- In the mobile context, she is able to quickly drill down from a macro view to individual transactions to understand the market movers and potential leads to share with her team while she is on the move.
Clark
Position: Commercial Real Estate Investor
Company: Asset Associates
Age: 52
Goals:- Expand his reach and his ability to operate across geographies and property sectors
- He needs to compare relative value, liquidity and price trends across markets and property types
- He needs to understand capital flows, market players and the competition for assets
- He needs to stay on top of trends and have immediate knowledge of changing market conditions and activity
- He needs to identify potential investment opportunities in the mobile context giving him the ability to target properties that meet his specific detailed criteria.
- He needs to find firms which could be potential joint venture partners in any context.
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Setting The Product Foundation
User Journey
Keeping our major Personas in mind, we mapped their behavioral flow to understanding the activity of the current Commercial Real Estate Market.
Understanding their decision making and flow within the CRE market research experience led us to facilitate workshops with stakeholders in order to brainstorm the necessary features and opportunities required to successfully help users and the business meet their goals
Information Architecture
By analyzing the CRE research journey we were able to narrow down the features for the initial MVP via dot voting for the new RCA Web App.
A content taxonomy map was created to give meaning to defined features
Site maps to organize the pages, information, and navigation of the marketing site, web app and mobile app were created.
User flows were created to visualize key tasks within the product such as those that happen during a Transaction Search. By going through this flow of key tasks, it helped to think through most users core activity in this section and ensure a seamless process in extrapolating CRE information for RCA users.
Wireframing
After getting into alignment with the stakeholders involved, we were able to begin sketching out and putting together a design system for the visual architecture of the product in order to bring the design to life.
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Bringing the Prducts to Life
Validation
RCA's new lead generating initiatives were greatly enhanced by a clear value proposition and messaging aligned to who Real Capital Analytics helps and their differentiators. Lead Conversions up 50% YOY after launch.
After conducting usability testing with prototypes and improving them based on users' feedback, the overall feeling was now user flows of new RCA web product offerings were frictionless and the start of the journey through the RCA's Commercial Real Estate analytics process was now much more intuitive.
Customer engagement exploded through the roof after the new produdt launch. Drastic reduction in bounce rates. Huge reduction in churn. Dramatic increases in users, user sessions and session duration.
Helping our users comprehend markets in the fastest possible way enhanced their trust and credibility in RCA tools.
Providing our users a quicker and much clearer way to get a view of their markets in the mobile context.
