One of my biggest battles when I started designing was
understanding that references are essential when it comes to
working, especially when we talk about UX design. I remember
that during my first month of work as a designer, my boss
said to me, "Do you think someone who builds a rocket starts
from scratch, or do they take a reference from a rocket that
already works and try to improve it?" Improve, isn't that
everything in the end? Improve the experience of our clients
when using our product. Improve our offer over the
competition to increase our market positioning. Look for
what is working, understand it deeply, try to break it, find
its weaknesses, and improve it. Again: progress, compete. If
you are going to design a real estate search platform,
observe the whales, because they have already found a path
that works. Learn from them because they have spent a lot of
time analyzing the market and adapting their product to its
needs. Once you have that, transform yourself into their
customer. If you find a pain point, a possible improvement,
in some way you have already won, even if you don't have the
resources to bring it to production at that moment. A
long-term goal in a product development plan also implies
value. Going back to the example of the real estate
buying/selling platform, I remember when idealista released
the feature of adding private notes to a property and how
brilliant I thought it was. How useful it could be for a
user. In Spain, a person makes an average of 7 to 10 visits
to properties before deciding on a home. We then assume that
the number of previous contacts, where the first questions
are answered, is higher. Just with that information, we can
already start to understand how useful it can be for them to
take notes about the properties to easily analyze the new
information along with what was already advertised. As I
said, a stroke of genius. So I thought: as a user, what
could I add here to improve something that already works?
And I started to create scenarios. My final proposal was to
be able to share those notes with another user. Imagine you
are looking for a home with your partner, and you split the
tasks. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to share and unify
the notes each of you takes? And what if you are the real
estate agent and can share notes about visits with your
colleagues directly from the ad? Turning the platform into a
tool that allows collaborative work. In short, it seems to
me to be such a complex and interesting product that I
needed to replicate it as if a new platform were about to
hit the market. So, I created a fake brand, Madrigueras, and
using the Design System I created for the last post, I made
some of the main pages. I'm sharing the link to the Figma
document in case you want to take a look. I'd love to hear
your thoughts, so please leave me your feedback! 🌱
