Understanding Home Sellers
Personas and Journeys
Foundational research created to help guide product decisions and help team members empathize with our clients
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THE PROBLEM
How can we better understand the seller's point of view, goals and pain points in order to identify areas of opportunity in the market?
There was a lack of foundational research around the home seller's experience at Rocket Homes. Along with the research team, I devised an interview protocol, spoke with 11 home sellers and created personas and journeys based on that research and later quantified the research with a survey for home sellers. The goal of this project was to illuminate customer needs in today's market which Rocket Homes could address.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
This project lasted about 9 months in totality.
MAKE OF THE TEAM
The team included 3 other UX Researchers as well as stakeholders from the Product team.
KEY GOAL
Understand home sellers & drive product creation.
MY ROLE
For this project I lead the research effort with support from my UX Research teammates.
I develop the interview protocol, which I received feedback on from not only my team, but also other stakeholders, and conducted 11 user interviews on usertesting.com.
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An affinity diagram workshop was then coordinated to help with analyzing videos and collecting data points from the interviews. This involved product managers and UX Designers. Having other team members participate helped with gaining buy-in from other stakeholders.
I then worked to synthesize the findings into themes and key findings. Two personas began to emerge, the first-time home seller and the repeat home seller. Using an excel template from NN/g I was able to construct personas and journeys which were handed off to the design team.
From left to right: An affinity diagram of user insights, pictures of home sellers interviewed and the persona-journey excel document.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
This project set a standard for how Personas and Journeys would be created in the future so it was important for me to align with my team's expectations for the artifact and how the business would incorporate this research going forward.
Understanding the difference between a UX persona and a marketing persona was the first hurdle for me in this process. By focusing on the behavior, desires and frustrations of these home sellers, I was able to stay away from more demographic based information, and leave that to our experienced marketing team.
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Finding the excel template from NN/g was vital because it helped me define the right persona-journey structure. It allowed me to stop getting distracted by a pixel perfect design and focus on the research alone.
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I also incorporated feedback sessions with my team often to confirm I was heading in the right direction and keep the communication channels open.
Pictured above is the final artifact for "Repeat Home Seller Sandra" perfected by the design team.
SHARE-OUT & NEXT STEPS
After sharing the personas and journeys I created with stakeholders, I focused on creating a survey to substantiate this effort with quantitative data. Finally, I conducted an ideation workshop based off this research.
I walked through the personas and journeys in excel spreadsheet form with stakeholders from the product team and shared the next steps in this process which included a quantitative survey and ideation session.
From that meeting, stakeholders were able to see how the research could be useful in other areas of the business such as training new licensed real estate agents who don't have experience selling a home yet.
As opportunities present themselves for personas and journeys to be made for other client segments, I make sure to assist my teammates by sharing my learnings from this process and providing support for them along the way.
LESSONS LEARNED
This was a great experience to have early in my time at Rocket Homes because it taught me it's not a sign of weakness to ask for help and though you may be working independently it is important to use your team as a resource.
Looking back on the experience now, I realize I felt a lot of pressure to prove myself and that I belonged on this team, but that energy was not serving the project and under utilized the resources at my disposal.
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I'm really proud of this project and how much it helped me build confidence and grow as a UX Researcher. This research has been referenced often and helped to build future feature and product ideas for Rocket Homes.
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