RibbonHub

Ribbon was a first of its kind real estate technology company transforming the real estate transaction by delivering certainty, transparency and joy to the home buying process. Consumers and realtors deserve a better experience, and we have designed an open platform that welcomes everyone in the ecosystem to participate.

As the design lead for the Offers Platform team at Ribbon, I worked closely with our engineering manager and team of software engineers to define our product strategy and create value for our customers through our digital experience and offerings for real estate agents specializing in home buying process.

The most important value add that we were bringing to the market, based on our data and user research, was that our financial products that allowed our users to close on homes through cash-offers and appraisal contingency waivers were very popular during this time. We were able to allow prospective homeowners who were unable to compete in this market with all-cash buyers by giving them the access to our funds up-front to make a competitive offer, without the capital personally held.

2021 was an unprecedented year in the American real estate market. Home values grew at a pace never seen before, and we were experiencing a seller’s market, where demand exceeded supply for a large chunk of the first half of the year. Source

The Challenge

Stress points for real estate agents through a weak understanding of our product, as well as UX pain points made for a less-than-ideal experience. Agents were troubleshooting with our account managers and customer support frequently because of errors, poor communication and low visibility into Ribbon’s process. 

Concurrently, our product was not set up in a way that would make changes to the user experience happen without taking on a lot of technical debt. Many of the processes that were put in place presupposed the idea that real estate agents would want to work on one property for their client and submit an offer. This ended up not being the case. Most agents were looking at multiple homes and were forced to run through many steps that had been previously completed for each home their client wished to see.

My hypothesis: Underlying code is difficult to extend and debug because there are added complexities to make the information architecture work within the existing UX. if we create a modularized experience that can serve as the foundation for future offer experience that would not compromise the current product. This required working closely with the engineering manager to ensure we were always working towards a product that can be iterated on quickly. 

Proposed solutions

Increase Buying Agent Adoption

The Offers Platform should provide a seamless software experience from website to login to understanding what we do to getting started. The software should drive more agents to start offers and submit offers through the product to listing agents with little issues with usability.

Behavior we want to see:

• Agents can use the offers software on their own without needing the help of a Ribbon Account Manager, freeing the account managers up to focus on acting as "offer consultants" to help agents craft the best offer possible
• Agents are submitting their offers to listing agents through the product
• Agents are making all of their offers on Ribbon, not just cash offers.
• End to end submission of offers online.

‍Modularize the product to streamline the journey into the product so that the user is afforded the right about of information at the right time. 

Agents encounter issues that block them from being able to submit offers via RibbonHub

• Because agents are often on a deadline to get offers out, most of these issues are resolved by submitting off platform
• Product support restrictions not advertised (price, state-by-state cases, type of home.)
• Accidentally marking offers as accepted/declined when they don't mean to
• Many use cases not taken into account until after friction is experienced by a user. 

Across desktop, mobile web, and supporting iOS app (feature timeline for iOS app is distinct, but needs to be considered once new products are introduced into the native app. Live site can be accessed here.

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Results and Next Steps

Results

One of our Q3 team goals was to reduce the median time it takes an agent from starting an offer to submitting an offer. We were able to decrease this number by 47% in Q3 (3.6 hours -> 1.9 hours)

Themes from what we learned and what we’ll take into Q4 and into Q1 of 22. 

We found that in Q2 is historically when there's the highest demand for our product . Plan is to do big bets/experimentation in Q4 to test/train team in Q1. Use Q1 to invest in stabilizing processes ahead of Q2.

• Transparency Providing transparency on status and clear next steps are the key to service quality and scale
• Collaboration Shaping RibbonHub to be platform for stakeholders to collaborate on the home buying process enables us to drive demand from multiple angles
  

Team OKRs that have come out of the work thus far, for q4 of 2020.

Make sure this takes into account seasonality

• Increase on-platform offer submission rate (# of on-platform submissions / # of submitted offers) from 59% to 80%
• Decrease median time from offer submit to offer resolve to 24 hours

• Accounts for how Offers Platform can impact closing excellence
• Today: 2370 minutes (1.6 days)

• Increased loan officer driven leads
  

Cross-functional responsibilities

Due to the lean nature of the start-up world, through pairing closely with the engineering manager on our team and reaching out to product operations for support, we shared ownership of product management as well in the absence of a dedicated product manager for our team. Additionally, I work cross-functionally across the product teams to ensure our brand across all offerings is unified under our single company vision of making homeownership achievable for all.

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Team Initiatives

• On-platform offer submission education. Show the agent the value of submitting via Ribbon vs downloading and submitting offline
• Collaborative Offer Room - iterate the client detail page and property overview page to be a collaborative space for agents and loan officers. First step in building the real estate transaction ecosystem

• Tech debt implications surrounding some of our internal processes on the criteria around generating property information on our system, and how we persist these relationships

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Additional Content

Design discovery and socialization artifacts, misc

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We broke down the opportunity areas into our site architecture. Site map and work rollout order needed to be considered to not create technical debt and continue to support our current product without breaking our current user flows.

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Wireframes

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