REQUIDITY
NEW YORK
PROJECT
OVERVIEW
⇀ What if real estate traded like stocks?
→ Requidity is a marketplace for real estate interest. Buyers and sellers enter bids and ask offers. Sellers gain the ability to sell minority interest. Buyers are exposed to new opportunities at an accessible dollar amount.
→ Locate, register, trade, manage.
LET'S TALK
ABOUT IT
01. DEVELOPMENT TEAM
I acted as the Product Designer on a team of 5, working closely with my team and with the client’s team, on a daily basis.
As we were all working remotely, collaboration took place through Slack, Jira, Invision, Hangouts, Zoom.
As for role specifics, I took the project through all of its phases (initial documentation and research, early concepts, wireframes, prototypes,
high-fidelity designs). By closely collaborating with the developers, I made sure that all the functionalities were properly implemented and tested, as per the designs, and as per the documentation I put together.
02. PROJECT TIMELINE
This project was more in the lines of an MVP, as the client wanted to have the core concept(s) functional.
Requidity was a "test the market" product more than anything. We were supposed to deliver the MVP in around 5 months, but things got extended with a couple more months, due to third-party payment integration issues.
03. INITIAL DOCUMENTATION
We have received a number of documents from the client, which were comprised of business requirements, legal requirements, and flows.
While going through the provided documents, I wanted to also study and research the market, to better understand certain concepts.
The problem here was that at that time there was only one product on the market that was doing something/somehow similar, so studying the competition wasn't really an option. Now because of that, I had to focus on studying multiple markets/areas, the main players being the real estate market and the stock market.
As I was going through this specific process, I was also drawing on paper really early concepts, which I always use to set up the foundation of a project. From my perspective this is a healthy take on a project, especially on anything that reaches certain levels of complexity. Plus, this transitions nicely into user interviews, stories, use cases, edge cases, etc.
Throughout this specific process, as well as on later steps, I did collaborate closely with the team and the client, talking concepts, best practices, what's bad, what's good, what can be even better.
04. USER STORIES & USE CASES
Once I went through the initial documentation and research, and once I had some early concepts and a good grasp of things, I started putting together user stories and use cases. I was quite interested in finding out the edge cases as early as possible, especially on a project like this where you need to take into consideration legal requirements as well.
I was sure some edge cases would arise during the wireframing stage, but I wanted to cover as much as possible during this early stage.
I generally like using interviews as well during this initial research phase, but on this project that was not possible.
07. WIREFRAMES
With the core concepts in place, it was time to layout the initial user flows through wireframes & prototypes. This guided the team’s initial development and architecture as well as provided the client with an early iterative process.
User testing was also introduced during this step, and I have also repurposed the user stories that I have written to serve as tests.
08. HI-FI TIME
As there weren't any branding guidelines for this project, it fell into my responsibility to put something together.
Even though the time was limited on this project, I did manage to work something out with the client, in terms of branding guidelines + logo. You can check the screens below to see how this came together.
FINAL
WORDS?
Overall this was a fun project to work on, revolving around a pretty unique idea, combining elements from several fields into a single product.
I just wish we had more time on our hands to expand the product and create some awesome features.
However, since it was an MVP, a product designed to test the/some waters, we did pretty good; we managed to implement everything that was required in a proper way, without sacrificing anything.
The team did run into some hiccups but those hiccups were out of our control, out of our reach.
I am mainly talking about the payment gateways/providers and their ability to offer what our project required. I won't go into detail, but after several attempts we finally managed to work with Synapse. They were able to offer tailored services, and also provide the required API functionalities.
And even though we had to redo certain areas of the web application due to this, it was all fine ultimately.
©2021 ROBERT BERKI SENDS HIS REGARDS
SONG OF THE DAY: EVERYTHING2ME