Fitwel is the pioneer real state platform that certifies buildings that comply with the seven health impacts. The company aims for a healthier future where every building is enhanced to support the well-being of its occupants and support healthy communities.
The clients are mostly property owners, asset managers, or consultants looking to get their portfolios certified for various reasons like a market differentiator, tenant satisfaction, and return on investment.
Getting certified by Fitwel is an important recognition in the real state industry — yet most clients and users of the platform find the product rigid.
Overall, the tasks are complicated, hard to understand, and honestly, boring.
We had the challenge of making the platform from a dull-inefficient product to a tool that inspires users to take action towards enhancing their projects for a healthier future.
After understanding the product and interviewing users, we focus on the current platform's most urgent and painful aspects and set a couple of goals.
We broke the project down into a few crucial chunks of work.
There were four clear bits of work we worked with:
1. Research: interview users and stakeholders to understand user needs and pain points and make a competition analysis to identify areas of opportunity.
2. Prioritization: prioritize the features and UX enhancements based on user research to ensure we meet the deadline.
3. Ideation: sketch and wireframe screens to focus on the information architecture and content.
4. Visual Design production: build a design system with foundation elements and components for scalability and create high-fidelity design prototypes.
Across the whole process, many reviews and feedback rounds happened to iterate the designs.
Given that this work was a complete redesign of the product, we decided to build a design system from the start to collaborate between designers faster, ensure consistency, and make the product scalable. As a result, we create a solid foundation supporting current and near-future interaction needs.
We came up against some challenges related to time and budget.
The client had a specific budget limit that couldn't be surpassed per month, which meant that we had a tight deadline with which we had to work with to finish the project. Knowing these constraints, we had to decide what to do and what not regarding features and enhancements.
That's when multiple good sessions of prioritization with the client and the team came in handy to ensure we addressed the most important things for the user and the business, ending up with a specific score that guided our roadmap planning.
Even though we conducted user research, the client decided to refrain from performing any usability testing as part of the process because of time and money constraints. Instead, they prefer to launch the new version and observe how users interact.
After a few iterations, we got to a well-performing baseline. This huge piece of work was about building a solid design system, design language, and a new version of their platform.
We delivered a whole redesign product that is inspiring, efficient, and easy to use to help their clients make certification seamless.
Additionally, we created a robust design system and component library, ensuring consistency and continuity as Fitwel implements the new designs.
Separating the work into sections for designers it's helpful to organize the sprint. Still, every designer must know what the other designer is doing and understand their part, not work isolated on their tickets.
Having close and clear communications w/ developers will allow designers to understand the technical limitations or why something might be difficult to implement. Also, developers provide great feedback as they focus more on the logical side.
We should approach a more user-centric design by encouraging and explaining to the clients the value and importance of conducting user testing. Even a small one is better than none because it saves soooo much time and money.
