2019 - 2022 Compass UX design and research

Compass is a real estate brokerage that provides a robust technology platform designed to strengthen the relationship between agents and their clients and empower agents to grow their businesses. A few select projects:

Though individual real estate agents operate their businesses in ways that are wholly unique to their experience and location (among other factors), they share a common core workflow to qualify leads, win clients and listings, and close deals:

1. Identify opportunities (leads) and nurture relationships
2. Shepherd the client through a set of buying or selling milestones
3. Collaborate with clients and other transaction parties to close the deal

The problem: the Compass platform did not support the way agents actually work. Compass provided a CRM (customer relationship management) tool, but it lacked key capabilities. And while agents could use other tools or services to complete all the steps necessary to close a transaction, the process was often tedious, time-consuming, and expensive.

We set out to build a holistic platform for agents that could enable them to:

Understand the state of their business
Some agents keep track of their active and historical transactions on a whiteboard next to their desk, or a homegrown spreadsheet. Other agents don't track this information with any consistent method.

Know what to do next to drive the transaction forward
Keeping on top of what tasks have been completed and what's to come can be tedious for agents. For agents working with a team, tracking tasks can get doubly complex and time-consuming.

Collaborate with clients, teammates, and other transaction parties
Collaboration can take place over different methods, such as text or email, but makes tracking important details and documents next to impossible.

We started by talking to dozens of Compass agents of different backgrounds, locations, team sizes, years of experience, and expertise with technology to understand the biggest opportunities for relieving common pain points. We also completed analyses of all of the tools, services, and methods agents were already using to understand the costs, both financial and otherwise, they were incurring.

Business Tracker was never intended to be owned by a single team at Compass. To successfully launch a cohesive product, from the start, we engaged all other product teams at Compass and defined the collaboration model that would lead to Business Tracker becoming the central hub of the platform.

While Business Tracker started as a sales pipeline, it has evolved to encompass almost the entirety of Compass's offerings, offering agents a wide array of capabilities:

• Client communication and task assignment
• Marketing management
• Collaboration with team members
• Digital document filling and e-signature
• Compliance review
• Commission fulfillment
• ...and more!

Client relationships are the core of a real estate agents' business. Agents have many entry points on the Compass platform for staying in touch with their network, but remembering the crucial details about each of their leads is a juggling act. The Compass CRM had an existing contact profile summary, but it could only be accessed from very particular parts of the platform, and displayed limited information.

I redesigned the contact summary into a drawer that could be accessed contextually throughout the Compass platform. Anywhere a client appears in the platform, the agent can easily view their info. This allows agents to pull quick details about their leads or clients while sending emails or other communication from within the platform, assigning tasks to their clients, or even completing transaction forms.

Additionally, I spoke with our users about what elements of the existing solution met their needs, and what was missing. I synthesized their feedback and reorganized the contents of the drawer to bring the important data points to the forefront and excised unhelpful data completely. Finally, the drawer was designed as a modular container so that as the Compass platform grew, the contact drawer would evolve to display the most relevant information needed to help an agent complete their tasks.