Redefining Market Data: Achieving a 39% Increase in User Engagement
Enhancing data visualisation and user experience for institutional investors
January 25, 2025
5 min read
The market insights section is the most valuable product feature for investors conducting market research and validating investment opportunities.
Being the first module users land on when signing into the platform, it sets the tone for the user experience.
Feedback From Exisiting Clients
Client feedback consistently showed that the previous UI and UX design felt outdated and restrictive.
- Users often lose track while searching through data.
- Users ran into non-working features and broken functionality.
Previous screens
Workshop Outcomes
I facilitated a workshop with key stakeholders from investment management backgrounds. Together, we developed concepts to enhance user interactions and increase engagement.
- Provide a macro view of the market with period-over-period changes, similar to stock market indicators, increasing the users outlook on markets.
- Allow users to drill down into specific markets to analyze regional trends, providing more detailed insights.
Assumptions
We initially assumed users wanted a single dashboard page where they could see the entire market at a glance.
We expanded the functionality by adding comparison features that let users analyse different data sets. For instance, comparing price distributions by room count between different areas.
Lessons from prototyping:
- The dashboard design was too cluttered, trying to display too much information.
- Adding more chart functionality (filtering, percentiles) would have made the interface even more complex.
- Users typically focus on one dataset at a time when preparing investment pitches.
- The interface lacked geographical context and search reference points.
Back to the drawing board
Simplifying the flow from four screens to two.
- A homepage featuring a macro market outlook and a leaderboard highlighting the markets with the most significant changes.
- A location-specific screen with consistent UX for location searches. Users can switch between tabs for market data, sales, rentals, yield, demographics, and more. An interactive map aids navigation and provides area context.
- Future improvements could include heat maps for alternative data visualisation.
Final Design
Impact
The redesigned market data module has significantly improved user engagement and data accessibility. Key metrics show:
- PostHog data revealed a 39% increase in time spent analysing market data.
- Positive feedback from institutional investment teams, saying they were impressed with the functionality of this module.
- The feature enabled faster decision-making process for property valuations.
- Higher confidence in market valuations due to clearer data presentation.
- The new interface has become an essential tool for our sales team to demonstrate the platform's capabilities and value proposition.
Reflection
- Features focused on users needs:
- Simplicity Wins:
- User-Driven Development and Engineering the Results:
I had to see past the instructions passed down from our CEO and overcome my natural inclination to add features because they were technically possible. Instead, I learned to ask questions, listen and focus on what users truly needed.
When I saw users struggling with our complex initial design, it reinforced an important lesson, more straightforward solutions often work better. Depending on the testing outcome, complexity can always be added or removed.
With grand visions of improving the human experience. It always remains prescient to include your engineering team in the conversation. Discovering the complexity of the build will help determine the minimally viable version we can release to clients.
