Viva Green Homes
UX Research & UX/UI Design · General Assembly Client Project
Project Context:
Viva Green Homes is a real-estate platform focused on the eco-friendly housing market, connecting buyers and sellers with professionals experienced in sustainable homes and green-building practices. Our team worked with Viva Green Homes as part of a General Assembly project to improve its lead-generation experience.
Challenge:
Design a web-based lead-generation experience that could better match buyers and sellers with relevant eco-certified real-estate professionals while more clearly communicating the value of those professionals.
Duration: 2.5 weeks
Tools: Google Docs · Google Forms · Sketch · InVision
The Team: Sheldon Mojica · Molly Fu
My Contributions:
UX research, user flows, wireframing, prototyping, interaction design, and visual/interface design.
Understanding the Business
We began by speaking with Viva Green Homes and reviewing the existing experience to understand both the business goals and the limitations of its current lead-generation model. We also received read-only access to site analytics to help inform our understanding of user behavior.
Kick-Off Call — Key Takeaways
Data:
The existing experience relied heavily on site analytics to understand user behavior and needs. We were given read-only access to this data to help identify opportunities for improving the lead-generation experience and informing how users could be matched with agents.
Value Proposition:
Viva Green Homes needed to more clearly communicate why working with an eco-focused real-estate professional mattered. Users might not immediately understand how these agents differed from conventional realtors or what additional value their sustainability expertise could provide.
Agent Matching:
At the time, users were primarily matched with agents based on location. This limited the ability to create more personalized recommendations based on the specific needs of individual buyers and sellers.
Target Audience:
Viva Green Homes asked us to focus the experience on millennial home buyers and sellers, giving us a defined audience to investigate during the research phase.
Understanding the User
With the target audience defined, we focused our research on understanding how prospective millennial buyers and sellers thought about eco-friendly housing, what information mattered to them, and how familiar they were with the benefits of sustainable home features.
User Survey
We surveyed members of the target demographic to better understand their knowledge of eco-friendly home features, their priorities when evaluating a home, and the factors that could influence their decision to work with an environmentally focused real-estate professional.
The survey helped us identify gaps between users’ general interest in sustainable housing and their understanding of the specific benefits those features could provide.
Creating Personas
We synthesized our research into personas representing the needs, goals, and behaviors we observed within the target audience. These personas gave the team a shared reference point as we evaluated the lead-generation flow and began developing potential solutions.
Competitive & Usability Analysis
We reviewed competing real-estate platforms to understand common approaches to agent matching, onboarding, and user education. One notable gap was that most competitors provided little information about eco-friendly housing or the value of working with professionals experienced in sustainable real estate.
We also asked users to evaluate several competitor experiences. HomeLight’s onboarding flow emerged as the preferred approach, giving us a useful reference for structuring the matching process. However, participants consistently disliked being required to submit personal information before seeing potential agent matches.
This gave us an important design principle moving forward: make the matching process guided and personalized without creating unnecessary commitment or friction early in the experience.
Research Conclusions
Our research surfaced two primary opportunities. First, users were generally receptive to eco-friendly home features but often lacked a clear understanding of their practical value. Second, users responded positively to a guided agent-matching experience, provided they could explore potential matches before being asked to submit personal information.
These findings shaped our design direction around education, personalization, and reduced friction. The experience needed to help users understand the value of sustainable housing while making the path to finding an appropriate real-estate professional feel simple and low-pressure.
Design Ideation
With the research phase complete, we began translating our findings into the structure of the lead-generation experience. Our first priority was determining what information would be most useful for creating a more relevant match between users and real-estate professionals.
Agent Matching Criteria
Viva Green Homes’ existing matching process relied primarily on location. Based on our research, we identified four criteria that could support a more personalized match: location, budget, property type, and eco-friendly features.
Expanding the matching criteria allowed the experience to consider not only where a user was searching, but also the type of property they were interested in, their budget, and the sustainability expertise most relevant to their needs. These criteria became the foundation for the onboarding flow we designed.
User Flow & Card Sorting
After defining the core matching criteria, we needed to determine the most intuitive order for presenting those questions during onboarding.
We used a card-sorting exercise to evaluate how users naturally grouped and prioritized location, budget, property type, and eco-friendly features. The results helped us structure the onboarding sequence around a flow that felt logical and easy to complete.
Wireframes
With the onboarding structure and matching criteria defined, I translated the experience into wireframes that mapped the core steps of the user journey.
The wireframes focused on keeping the matching process clear and approachable, guiding users through each decision without overwhelming them with unnecessary information. This gave us a foundation for refining the interaction flow before moving into the interactive prototype.
Interactive Prototype
We translated the wireframes into an interactive prototype that demonstrated the core agent-matching experience from onboarding through potential matches.
The prototype brought together the research-driven matching criteria and user flow, allowing us to show how users could move through the experience while providing information progressively rather than being asked for personal details upfront.
Future Opportunities
If the concept were developed further, the next phase could explore additional ways to support both sides of the marketplace.
User education: Expand educational content around sustainable housing and eco-friendly home features, giving users more context as they evaluate properties and agents.
Agent experience: Conduct additional research with real-estate professionals to better understand their needs, lead-management expectations, and the business model surrounding referrals and compensation.
Project Takeaways
This project demonstrated how user research and business requirements can work together to shape a more focused product experience. By moving from stakeholder conversations and competitive analysis through user research, matching criteria, flow design, wireframing, and prototyping, we developed a concept grounded in both user needs and Viva Green Homes’ lead-generation goals.
The project also reinforced the value of reducing friction early in an onboarding experience—giving users enough information and control to build trust before asking them to commit personal information.