Designing a ERP software for Canada’s Largest Independent Brokerage

Context

RAHR (Right at Home Realty Inc.) is the number one real estate brokerage in the GTA and the largest independent brokerage in Canada. Spanning across 12 offices and over 5,000 active agents.

RAHR had engaged in services looking to transform their operations by automating key administrative tasks to ultimately increase market share and provide a superior user experience for real estate agents in Canada.

Major Activities at RAHR

Deal Processing

Relates to the regulator requirements of documenting and verifying real estate transactions.

Agent Onboarding/Offboarding

The processes and procedures related to recruiting agents, verifying the information, having them join RAHR, and ultimately terminating them if necessary.

Professional Development

Continuous training and improvement of RAHR agents to give them a competitive edge against other brokerages.

My Role

Initial Project Status

We were a team of 3 Designers. When I joined the project, initial research was conducted some modules were underway in conceptualization and wireframing.

My Task

My focus was on the Deal Processing module which was 70% of the key major usage of the platform. I had also assisted in overviewing and creating/iterating designs for other modules. My other major focus was designing the mobile app version of the modules.

Activities

Create & Maintain the Design System
User Research
Solutioning & Wireframing
Hi-Fidelity Mockup Designs
Prototyping and User Testing 
Iterations & Handoffs to Dev
Create Mobile Designs

The Challenge

Double/triple entry of data

Due to unsophisticated technology and multiple tools being used throughout the organization, a lot of data requires double/triple entry.

Manual processes

Many processes today are still done manually (e.g. creating accounts, onboarding agents, etc.)

Lack of data transparency

There is no centralized place for both corporate and branch operations to gather data and derive insights about the organization.

Manual deal verification

Much of deal processing today requires manual data verification. It is also highly error-prone to do the manual duplication of data by agents and deal processors

Research

We had sat down with the RAHR deal processing team to go through their current processes for deals. We had whiteboarding sessions with them jotting down the flows as well as shadowed them making deals using their current tools in order to allign on the flow. Below is a figjam snapshot of a high level deal flow.

Competitor Flow Analysis

We had analyzed three different competitors and looked at how they do their deal processing, we analyzed the usability of their interfaces and discussed the pro's and con's of each interface with the RAHR deal team in order to lay out a more detailed process of flow.

Detailing Process & Flow

There were 12 different deal types, with each having different conditional flows through the whole process. We had made sure to detail out each flow in accordance with the RAHR deal team to make sure not only compliance was followed, but a more efficient and effective process was being architectured

Solutioning & Wireframing

We had started with creating low fidelity wireframes for all the flows on both the admin side and agent. We were able to get constant feedback from the deal team on different solutions. Once we had wireframes for the major flows of the all the deals, we were able to do some task based usability testing with Agents to further refine the flows.

Design System

We had establishing a unified visual language with color palettes, typography, iconography and component library to ensure consistency and scalability in the designs. We would regularly iterate and refine the design system to sustain relevance and effectiveness in not only how the interface looks, but for developers to refer to as well.