Helping a proptech startup go from idea to €4,3M in funding
We help SweepBright to identify practical problems real estate agents have. We then design and test a solution that supports real-life scenarios. The result is a highly valued product designed to scale from Buenos Aires to Brussels, from small business to enterprise.
It starts with understanding real estate agents' challenges
You are a busy real estate broker in Brussels. You have thirty appointments today. You carry your phone, notepad, and camera in a heavy backpack. Did you bring the legal documents? Building plans and leaflets? Your agenda? One traffic jam and you can forget about that sweet deal. How can you focus on your role as matchmaker in that mess?
That’s a big challenge, and SweepBright wants to solve it. If you want to know how, read on.
Designing a native iPhone app first
Our research confirmed that real estate agents are very mobile people. No real surprise there, but it was an important confirmation of the business thesis. It also made sense to start the design with the iPhone app. We wanted feedback early and often, and focusing on a narrow set of problems helped with that.
Even though the solution is perceived as a very simple one, we designed over two hundred different screens for the iPhone app alone, spread over more than ten active prototypes.
Maintaining patterns to share design knowledge
When many designers work together on an app, it helps to have a common language. For this purpose we maintain design patterns for both the iPhone App and Web App.
We created a UI Elements file with the iPhone app building blocks, which we share with the design team. We design the Web App in the browser with the help of our rapid prototyping tool Bedrock, which automatically generates a UI Guide.
An ecosystem of apps
Over the past six years, we helped the SweepBright team to design an ecosystem of applications. We don’t use that word lightly. SweepBright offers a mobile iPhone app, a web application, there’s an API and various integrations with third-party services.
Next to that we helped SweepBright with a strategy for their help functionality; an onboarding flow; and the design customizable, skinnable agency websites that can be controlled from the SweepBright platform.
Good design is never done
Once you build something, and you put it in the hands of people, unexpected things will happen. The team at SweepBright realises this. We continue to work with them to further improve features based on feedback from customers.
Mono has been a unique asset in the design process, not just because they came up with some great screens, but mostly because they kept challenging our vision. Sticking to our vision and adapting it where it became obvious that we were wrong, enabled SweepBright to come up with a brilliant interface that simplifies what was previously a very chaotic process.
