Request
Form
Overview
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Offerpad is an ibuying realtor solution, built on making the home buying and selling experience, fast, efficient, and more enjoyable, through the use of digital technology.
PROBLEM
Offerpad’s first touch point for consumers and their most important product was faced with many issues and inconsistencies throughout the experience. These inconsistencies led to inaccurate backend reporting and analysis, as well as challenges for users
Approach
User testing: to better understand the problems that were troubling for the original Request Form.
Stakeholder Buy-in: To get stakeholder buy-in we met as a team to prioritize our test findings into most critical to least critical. This helped when we presented our findings to the PM's, Acquisition Directors, and VPs of Conversion because it painted a clearer picture of what problems plagued the experience. This research and buy-in was critical because it helped propel the Request Form to a priority on the project roadmap.
Discovery and Research: To better understand what a new request form would look, feel, and function like, we took a look at numerous competitors; Opendoor, Redfin, and Orchard just to name a few. This research helped us ground our design decisions and a bit of direction into how create a consistent and effective form, while also giving us ideas on how to differentiate ourselves.
Constraints
Branding Input: During this project Offerpad was going through a visual branding refresh, and we had not yet had any design assets we could pull from, so for the first time we worked side by side with branding in order to make sure we were effectively communicating our new visual tone and voice. This led to a lot of discussion between our team in theirs to try and strike the balance between incorporating the new branding without compromising the usability and accessibility of the new form.
Number of Questions: A lot of discussion was had around whether or not we should decrease the number of questions or combine questions on the request form to decrease users time on task so that we get more users to finish the form. Our design pushed consistently for less questions we eventually got some removed but ultimately the stakeholders decided to add in more questions even after we had removed others.
Redesigning the Request Form
Our areas of focus for the redesign were:
Improved layout
Consistent selection mechanisms
A smarter and simpler form
Improved progress tracking
Improved progress tracking
Improved layout
The previous Request Form had many challenges from inconsistent typography to inconsistent layouts across viewports. We corrected this by creating a layout to is responsive and keeps a similar design from mobile to desktop.
Consistent selection mechanisms
- Problem - inconsistent selection mechanisms, inconsistent button ordering, and auto-next behavior causing preventing error correction.
- Solution: consistent button behavior, consistent button order, removal of auto-next behavior
Smarter and simpler form
- Problem - more questions on avg. than our competitors and a long and daunting question process.
- Solution - consolidate dynamic question onto one page as well as create a page for questions that could be answered at one time or are pre-populated.
Improved progress tracking
- Problem - The original progress bar got lost with the header and wasn't very informative about where you were in the process.
- Solution - Separate the progress tracker from the header and make the progress bar more fun and informative regarding where you are in the process.
Motion
- Problem - The form changes questions frequently with sometimes small variations in that could be unnoticed by a user who is not fully paying attention.
- Solution - Incorporate motion to signify a question has changed and reengage a user to notice the change.
Results and Takeaways
- We were able to implement all the changes and considerations we suggested from user testing of the original Request Form
- Having user research to support design changes assisted in gaining support for design recommendations
- Even with all the changes and consolidation of questions the form still remains long, there must be a continued effort to consolidate the form.