Coposit

User Problems

Coposit is a tool used by property developers with the goal of helping first home buyers as well as investors, by enabling them to purchase the property by breaking down the barrier of entry that is the deposit. For instance, if a house costs $500,000, in most of the cases you will need approximately 10% of the cost, which is $50,000 upfront.  A lot of people may not have $50,000 ready to go, but they still want to buy a house. They can afford the mortgage payments but may not have that bulk amount ready to make the initial payment.

Coposit, therefore, is allowing these buyers to do incremental instalment payments of the deposit before they purchase the house and sign off on their mortgage. The ideal time limit for the payment is 104 weeks. It can also be less. Plus, it is an interest-free service.

Business Problems

This benefits Coposit’s business as a property developer by having more people investing money. They can start signing people up to these houses that are willing to pay before the property is actually going to be complete. Not only the users will benefit from this, the business will also takes advantage as it helps to lower the cost for acquisition of potential buyers. Currently, developers are spending 2 to 3% of the budget of their entire building on marketing. This project will help to lower that cost as developers do not need to spend money on marketing campaigns.

Backlog creation

We also developed a prioritised agile backlog to make release and iteration planning easy. This broadcasted all the things the team plans to spend time on. Once the backlog was created, it was regularly maintained to keep pace with the project.

Backlog grooming

The product owner reviewed the backlog before every iteration plan meeting to confirm that prioritisation was right and feedback from the previous iteration has been monitored.

The entire team was involved in the process of defining user stories and following the work breakdown structure to prioritise core tasks. This process kept the team focused on the strategic trajectory of the product roadmap.

Design Sprint

The design sprint of this project assured all the team members was on the same page, which resulted in a successful collaboration of the team. Furthermore, performance, plan and progress were shared with the client by prototyping and testing solutions.

User Testing

Usability testing was crucial in make the app a success. Rather than designing just based on assumptions, the designers used the data from the testing . Furthermore, this testing allowed product teams to find any problems before it reached the end-users. It also helped to identify early bugs which allowed the smoother launch of the app.

Learning

Through the iterative process of using the user flow diagram, as well as the prototype, there were many things that we changed. At first, we wanted a very traditional type of app that already exists. But we quickly realized that we are not trying to become a real estate company.

One of the major lessons that the company has learnt from this project was that even if we are implementing something new to the audience, we need to be flexible enough to cater to other audiences as well. Also, we have learnt that we should be flexible. We have worked hard to create wireframes, flow diagrams, and so on. We also created too many business rules for avoiding loopholes, that made it rigid for the admin or the sales agent if something changes.

Next steps

Once the app was launched, it reached on the hands of users and then we started receiving  feedback. After that, we incorporated all the feedback into the next versions. The next steps to take is to look for the opportunity to resolve problems. For instance, the problem of rigidity and ensure that the problem will not repeat.