Project Impact
This case study demonstrates how I designed the form disclosure experience for Real Estate agents at Compass. This design helped increase Compass's market share on the seller side by 4.6% in 2022. Additionally, Compass agents successfully completed over 211k transactions with a total value of $230 billion.
Project Background
Compass recently acquired Glide, a company that helps people selling their homes in California with a guided disclosure filling experience. Compass wanted to extend this service to their agents in other markets, where disclosure requirements are less legally strict. After gathering feedback from agents in these markets, Compass's research team discovered that they would be comfortable allowing clients to fill out the disclosure form and provide their electronic signature immediately. To streamline the process for agents and clients, Compass decided to integrate the new disclosure process with their existing electronic signature process.
3 parts were required for this to work to its full potential:
Internal Compass form ops staff would need a tool to translate written documents into questions for the guided experience
Agents must choose the appropriate forms based on the client's location and property type. They then decide whether clients can complete and sign the forms at once before sending them for completion.
Clients receive the disclosure, complete it and then provide their electronic signature
My role:
I had previous experience with California Glide when I joined the project. However, my main goal was to figure out how to incorporate the disclosure and eSign features for listing agents. I closely worked with a product manager and engineers on the team. Additionally, I collaborated with other designers from the Documents team, our research team, and our content strategy team.
My approach
I reviewed how agents currently set up forms for their clients to complete and how agents enable clients to sign those forms. I looked at how these processes work and how they might be connected. After clients complete the forms, their agent reviews them and if everything is okay, the agent send them back for the clients to sign electronically.
Designing a new process:
I then outlined the entire process of how a new procedure would function. This outline includes the initial setup, the interactions between the client and agent, and what happens if the agent requires the client to make changes to their disclosure after signing it initially.
New designs
Once I figured the flow out, I started to craft a design (mobile-first, responsive web) to support this new feature:
Usability Testing:
I collaborated with our Research team to develop a test plan and find participants. My hypothesis was that Listing agents would have two options regarding their clients signing disclosures: either they allow immediate signing after completion or they review the disclosures before having the clients sign them, based on the agent's comfort level.
After testing with 7 participants, the two biggest learnings & recommendations to the team were:
The copy for choosing when to allow their client to sign was not clear to everyone. Additional versions of how that text can show should be reworked.
I added a way for agents to view the form they’re about to send to clients. This helped them more confidently know what they’re sending and if they want to allow for signing immediately after the client has completed the form.
Final Thoughts
I worked with the engineering team to get an initial release out in time for our pre-release deadline for further customer feedback and documented the findings from my research for future iterations.