CrowdStreet - Crowdfunding Commercial Real Estate

Build something real.

Centralizing the investing accounts.

Timeline & Platform

3 months for responsive web

Manage all of your investment accounts in one place.

CrowdStreet is a leading crowdfunding marketplace for commercial real estate. They have the best deal flow of any other competitor and are one of the fasted growing -tech companies in the US. I led the design for a project that brought all of the investment accounts on the platform to one place so that our customers could access them easily and transparently.

Establishing The Vulcan Design System

Establishing a design system was a must across all company UI. Creating a design system is a great first step. The real magic of a design system truly starts to happen when you get the developers and team excited about this ever-changing product. We started with atomic-level components and then built the larger ones from there. We went mobile first as a design team and began designing using the 8-point grid system. Hosting Friday sessions with product/dev attending was a highlight of my week.

Discovery & beyond

Centralizing the investing accounts discovery phase consisted of sorting through all existing accounts UI including profiles, documenting workflows, conducting user interviews both internally and externally with context mapping, landscape analysis, and reviewing analytics.

Quantitative metrics

Taking a deep dive into usage engagement metrics and customer support inquiries allowed us to point out a few specific areas to focus on.

  • What is the difference in information between my profile and investment accounts?

  • Where do I update my personal and investing account information?

  • How do they know if I’m “ready” to invest?

Qualitative magic

The other ingredient to discovery is the qualitative side of the equation. A landscape analysis was done as well as internal and external user interviews allowing me to pinpoint a few topics around the investing accounts. The interviews also allowed me to create personas for the investor side of our product to pass around the company.

  • How can I include other participating members in my investment accounts?

  • How do I get help?

  • How do I know if I’m “done” setting up?

Tools for success

Workshopping, testing, measuring, and designing couldn’t have been done without the endless hours spent choosing the right products to plan and execute the process.

Workshops

This is where getting everyone in on the project ensures its success. From stakeholders workshops to pod exercises, these workshops are where much of the teamwork takes place and this allows us to put a strong plan in place.

Rapid prototyping

After the workshops, two clickable prototypes were spun up. The prototypes completed a total of 5 rounds of user testing and a total of 3 rounds of usability tests with actual investors.

Results

Out with the old and in with the new

Primary navigation

Primary navigation lacked intuition. Creating a new space for Investing accounts meant placing it in plain sight allowing users to be one click away from it at all times.

Simplification and cleanup

All of the investment accounts and legal information were put in one location on the platform with an easy-to-navigate menu that snaps you from page to page without having the user gets lost. Even during an investor offer process we gave them an overview of their account with the investing accounts status and let them snap back to proceed with their offer process in no time when needing to update.

Success metrics

We took the average investor investing account setup time from 15 days to 3 days!

15 days ~ 3 days

Key takeaways

  • Have developer and design input from the beginning to see if the existing work is worth salvaging.

  • It helps to try and keep the team consistent if possible.

  • We are not the users - let’s prioritize their input.

  • Triple check to see that all parts of the product were scoped out for in the timeline.

  • Let the developers decide what they can do with their time.

  • Do a better job with the incremental. Remind yourself and the team that we’re agile and not waterfall.

Responsive design

Mobile first responsive design made the desktop easier and also made everything easier for the developers, especially when using the newly adopted Vulcan design system components across teams.