| Dashboard | Feb. 2024 | Ironhack Berlin | issued with Lena Link |
Intro
Y:EARN is an innovative solution in the real estate market that helps small and medium-sized private investors and property owners achieve their individually set goals. Does one have to be filthy rich to invest? And can one invest with non-economic goals in mind?
About the project
There are several products available on the German market that provide insight into the real estate market and support the decision-making process. However, only a few of them are available to private investors. And even then, existing solutions are crafted rather for big fish with a lot of capital.
User Personas
The Insightful Investor is rather focused on the highest possible return on investment. They say proudly:
I dream about a future where I come into my loft office with two big screens with my investment dashboards.
The Budget Investor, on the other hand, does not have huge investment capital and treats their real estate as a capital allocation and a mean securing their future rather than an income. They say:
My grandmother used to live in this apartment. Now that our daughter is little, we are renting it out, but we want it to be in good condition when she grows up.
Brand Identity
When creating the brand identity, we decided to brainstorm and then we presented five ideas selected from the general pool for voting by potential users. The name Y:EARN was among the favorites and we decided to go with it.
Y:EARN. We help, you earn!
The logo is the brand name itself with elements referring to Dashboard: circles resemble pie charts, and lines resemble bar charts. Rounded corners bring a modern character and take away some of the excessive seriousness present in traditional financial products.
The selected colors are to depart slightly from the tradition of financial products – for our web product we chose a mixture of neon green, bubblegum pink, and blueberry. Our moodboard survey confirmed that it supports the features we want: sustainable, modern, professional, clear and innovative.
When choosing font families, we chose sans-serif families, in some cases with increased kerning. Poppins for Headlines & Noto Sans for Paragraphs it is! The sizes of types vary from 40pt (H1) to 16pt (P3). This way we made sure that the service would be accessible.
Dashboard
Our aim was to present only the most important information on the Dashboard. We determined the display order while testing product prototypes.
The User will find an Ovierview of the locations of all properties, information about losses and their type [in studied case – vacancy], total maintenance and renovation costs for the current year, net market value of all properties alltogether, monthly rental income (divided into property categories for tax reasons), and overall cash flow in per cents in a given year from all properties in the User’s portfolio.
When hovering over the percentage value, the monetary value appears.
Unit Overview
The detailed information about a specific property is presented, obvously, in the unit view. The information includes: monthly income, mortgage repayment status, current ROI and ROI prediction, planned repair works and maintenance, as well as information about the tenant and amenities in the property.
Investment Simulator
The Investment Simulator is an intelligent tool that suggests which properties and investments are worth investing your money in to get the best possible outcome.
The User can choose between max. ROI when renting real estate, max. Sustainability, i.e. investments in pro-environmental features, such as greening or renewable energy sources, or in max. value increase – which may be important if, for some reason, the User has to sell the property in the near future and is interested in short-term profits.
Filter Feature
The Filter Feature allows one to quickly rank properties in terms of the highest absolute income and the highest generated absolute costs. By clicking on the Features icon on the left, the User can select additional features to display in the filter view.
Key Learnings and Prototype Recording
We had a lot of fun with Lena creating Y:EARN. We aimed to have a healthy balance between playfulness and professionalism, while mantaining the interface intuitive and motivating for users. I really do think that we created strong visual identity, and high utility.
In the future, however, we would like to incorporate more of continuous testing with users and explore AI reading tools (for automatic real estate documentation scanning), and machine learning for value predictions. It would be amazing to observe in what ways our ideas can be implemented.
We’ve also learnt that sustainability, ecology and climate are more important to many users than one might’ve thought. Developing the Sustainability features was for us of great importance, since it’s to our personal values.
We also learned that sustainability, ecology and climate are more important to many users than they might think themselves. Developing the sustainability features was of great importance to us because it aligns with our personal values.
| ROLES | DELIVERABLES | DURATION AND TOOLS |
|---|---|---|
| User Research User Experience Design Interface Design Visual Identity Information Architecture Business Analyst |
Landing page Dashboard Style card Responsive hi-fi prototype Smart animations Hand off to devs |
2-week sprint Figma & Photoshop User Interviews User testing Branding & Benchmarking |
Credits
- Real estate surprised and amazed asian woman staring at camera saying wow and showing paper house (…) by benzoix on Freepik
- Impressed caucasian man with red hair and beard showing blank laptop screen and thumbup looking (…) by benzoix on Freepik
- Amazed redhead girl looking at camera, showing smartphone screen, demonstrating mobile application, standing over blue background by benzoix on freepik
- Handsome bearded man has thick bristle, looks joyfully at camera, hears something very pleasant while talks with colleague by benzoix on freepik
- A few icons from Phosphor Icons for Figma design [CC-BY 4.0]