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DwellWell
DwellWell is a guided home buying platform. Rooted in education, it's purpose is to empower first time home buyers and lead them through the process from pre-approval to close. As the 0-1 designer I created the platform from inception to execution and made iterative changes post-launch.
View PrototypeImpact
23% MoM Growth • 100,000+ Buyers Educated • 100+ Homes PurchasedMVP Duration
8 WeeksMy Role
Product DesignerTools
Figma, Lottiefiles, Miro
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The Challenge
Navigating the home buying process can be a daunting task for first-time buyers due to its legal, financial, and market complexities. The process involves multiple challenges...
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• Knowing the steps in the process
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• Understanding your budget
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• Determining home preferences
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• Picking the best agent
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• Coordination with various stakeholders
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• Making the perfect offer
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• Knowing mortgage options
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• Dealing with emotional stress
In response to these challenges, this case study explores DwellWell, a product designed to simplify and guide first-time home buyers through the intricacies of the home buying journey, offering a user-friendly solution to enhance understanding and confidence throughout the process.
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Discovery
“It felt like jumping into the deep end”
Why is buying a home so painful? The process of home buying, with its multitude of steps, hoops, and tricks, still had nothing that truly made the experience easier.
What could we make that would improve this broken process? We set out and interviewed 15 home buyers about their process.
1. How much knowledge about the buying a home did you have before starting?
2. Did you use any technology systems in your process?
3. What was the process of getting pre-approved like for you?
4. How did you pick your real estate agent?
5. When you reached the end of your process, how did you feel?
Etc.
I discovered two common themes
Information & Process Gap
“Whole process feels very bootlegged. I had no idea what to do next.”
”Emphasize being able to find quality people, consolidate information that you have to dig around the internet for yourself.”
“Would be nice to have everything in one place, took some hunting to find our vendors. Most information I got was from the people I hired”
“15 different websites with massive info makes it difficult -- very overloaded with information, and it’s frustrating. Get mixed messages which is annoying.”
Service & Vendor Gap
”Probably could have gotten a lower mortgage rate elsewhere but it was just more convenient to go with my work’s mortgage”
“Our agent was helpful getting us into places but his knowledge was non-existent for the area. His job was just getting us into the houses to show us, and that’s it.”
“Was trying to let our broker negotiate and do her job, but she refused to be aggressive in negotiations which made me want to do it myself”
“Didn’t feel like our agent did that much; she didn’t show us anything that we didn’t already know about; we had to do all the work”
What our research revealed
Upon conversing with prospective and existing home buyers, we consistently identified common issues. We recognized a demand for a solution tailored to the home buying process. Users expressed a desire for a product that could effectively navigate them through the process, educate them, and introduce them to the right people at the right time.
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Defining Our Users
“I wish I had something like this when I bought a home”
User Personas
Based on insights gathered from user research, I developed user personas to inform our product, branding, and marketing strategies. By employing these personas, we adopted a user-centric design approach, enabling us to empathize with our users and effectively address challenges that resonate with their needs.
Card Sorting
I utilized card sorting to provide actionable insights into how users think and organize information creating an user-centric design.
This allowed us to create our information architecture and how to structure our guided journey for our users to better understand.
User Flows
From there, I outlined user flows to determine the flow of our product and better guide what information and tools we should surface when.
These user flows also identified a need for a personalized path for each user. Depending what information users provided, the journey would customize for their needs.
A freelance designer is going to have a different path than a high school teacher
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Prototyping
Wireframes
Next, I worked on the wireframes to establish the overall experience and flow. Looking to tools like TurboTax and DuoLingo, we created a guided solution that utilized personalization and gamification to education, motivate and excite users throughout the process. The initial wireframes enabled technical and business constraint discussions.
Usability Testing
In order to ensure product market fit, we built a beta product and conducted usability testing. Our findings were that users felt the experience was easy to follow and believed once built it would be a significant improvement to the existing process.
We still had a long way to go, but it was clear we were headed the right direction.
“I wish I had something like this when I bought a home”
“Yeah it’s like a TurboTax for home buying. Once it’s fully built I can totally see myself using it”
”Yeah this makes it so easy to understand what happens next”
Design System
As we acquired VC backing, it became clear we needed to prepare for scale. In order to improve efficiency and communication I created the DwellWell design system. This helped streamline design decisions, build new features, and execute product updates with speed.
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Final Product
We built DwellWell, an all-in-one home buying platform navigating users through the home buying process.
This process covered everything from budgeting and applying for a pre-approval to matching with mortgage lenders to find the best rate for your specific scenario.
Buying Basics
Financial Planning
Pick Your Agent
Find Your Home
