Equity is the property app that empowers first-home buyers to make informed investment decisions.

Background

In the dynamic and complex Australian real estate market, those seeking to buy their first home often face significant challenges in gathering and interpreting relevant information, making informed decisions, and navigating the various steps and legalities involved in the property purchase process. There is a growing need for a comprehensive and buyer-centric digital solution that addresses these challenges and empowers users to confidently search for, analyse, assess, shortlist, predict and confidently make informed property purchases in Australia.

Project Goal

Goal 1: Create a more balanced and transparent real estate market in Australia by creating an educated consumer.

Goal 2: Present relevant property data in a simple and relevant way that helps inform decision-making.

Understanding The User

My research aimed to validate the idea that the market needs a solution to help users find and buy property, whilst providing a non-biased, transparent result for the user.

We interviewed 4 key Stakeholders:

• 2 first-home buyers (Key Target Market)

• A Buyer's Agent (Secondary Target)

• An Investor (Secondary Target)

Market Research

Market research was gathered from a variety of sources including, competitors, peer-reviewed research, Core Logic data and parliamentary documents.

Persona

Sarah is a first-home buyer who is struggling to wade through all of the information needed to make an informed purchasing decision. She needs guidance through the buying process, relevant data to choose the right property, and help getting the purchase across the line.

Project Goal

Goal 1: Create a more balanced and transparent real estate market in Australia by creating an educated consumer.

Goal 2: Present relevant property data in a simple and relevant way that helps inform decision-making.

Understanding The User

My research aimed to validate the idea that the market needs a solution to help users find and buy property, whilst providing a non-biased, transparent result for the user.

We interviewed 4 key Stakeholders:

• 2 first-home buyers (Key Target Market)

• A Buyer's Agent (Secondary Target)

• An Investor (Secondary Target)

Wireframes for the Property Shortlist Flow

Visual Design

Based on the feedback from the wireframes along with the user research it was evident that the way that the app displays information must be easily digestable.

Moodboard

Visual Direction 1

Visual Direction 2

Final Visual Direction

For the final visual direction, we combined elements from both Direction 1 & 2 that received positive feedback from user testing.

Styles & Components

Prototype

Takeaways and next steps

Throughout this project, I've learnt the power of iteration and testing. Often, products are rushed to market before they're thoroughly tested by users. Obviously, there's a crucial balance between initial testing and real-world user testing. I believe the key is to have a clear goal from the outset, regularly checking back to ensure that you're staying true to the original intentions of the project. In this case, our future work will focus on the post-purchase flow of the app, ensuring that users are supported in alignment with the app's goal: to create a more balanced and transparent real estate market in Australia by educating consumers.