Simplifying document submission for new homeowners
CLIENT
Nestwork
YEAR
2022
OVERVIEW
Nestwork — Homeowner portal · Product Designer · Customer journey squad
Tags
Service Design, UX Research, Web, Forms
After buying an apartment, new homeowners had to send more than twenty documents to close the contract. The whole process ran on email and phone calls: people did not know which documents were missing, and files got lost along the way.
The operations team spent most of its week chasing paperwork instead of helping buyers. The goal was to cut the time to close a contract and give buyers a clear view of where they stood.
The challenge
Each buyer needed a different list of documents, depending on how they paid, whether they bought alone or with a partner, and which bank financed the loan.
A single long form would scare people away, and a fully custom flow for every case would be hard to maintain. The challenge was to build one journey that adapted to each buyer without turning into a maze.
My role
I designed the journey end to end. I ran service mapping workshops with operations, defined the rules for each document list with the legal team, designed and tested the prototypes, and worked with developers on upload states and error messages.
Workshops with the operations team to map every step of the old process, an analysis of three months of support emails, and usability tests with eight recent buyers. The biggest pain was not the upload itself, but not knowing what was still missing.
We started with a checklist that showed each buyer exactly which documents they needed, then added uploads, status tracking and reminders.
The prototypes went through three rounds of testing, and we released the journey one building at a time to catch problems early.
The new portal shows each buyer a personal checklist, lets them upload documents from their phone and tells them the status of every file. The operations team reviews everything in one place and can ask for a new file with one click instead of an email.
The results below come from the six months after the new journey went live. My role: end-to-end design of the submission flow, from mapping the old process with the operations team to testing prototypes with real buyers.
-45%
Time to close the contract
-60%
Support emails about documents
4.7
Buyer satisfaction score (out of 5)