How do you sell a house from your phone?

One of the most requested features from our customers at Nested is a method of managing their sale online. I had to answer the question of how do you start to design the ideal process for selling your house from your phone?

As there was a lot of work involved we needed to work on a strategy

About two years into my career at Nested the cries from our customers to have an online account management section were loud, so as a design team we needed to push this forward and advocate for our users.

Our small two person design team set about putting together a proposal of our vision for what we saw being included in our customers’ accounts. From managing their sale, to a group of tools, we wanted the account to be more than just a way to manage your way through the house sale process with Nested. We wanted to create an industry defining experience.

With this in mind, we decided that a simple information architecture diagram was our best approach and put the idea to all three co-founders and our wider product and technology team.

“I was really surprised you didn’t already have an online experience”

Tell me what you want, what you really really want

Our next logical step was to take this to user interviews and actually figure out what people wanted from their Nested account. To do this I partnered up with our acquisition tech product manager Steph, and we set about figuring out how to ask our customers what they wanted from a hypothetical Nested account.

It turned out they not only wanted everything we had already thought of but they also wanted the kitchen sink thrown in for good measure. Our customers wanted to feel in control and therefore, the more information and data we could give them the better

This didn’t come as a complete shock, being a smaller scale tech-startup, our customers are on the whole, early adopters and therefore have a mind for new technology. This means their demand for technology is higher and they expect more from the products they use.

We needed to start with the things that won’t change

To plot out the initial navigation structure I referred both to the initial I/A diagram we created and the user interviews. From this I was able to identify three key themes to bracket items of our new navigation into.

These are; Home Sale, Toolkit and Settings.

I then set about how we could create this navigation which would include a sub nav usable on a mobile. I tried a bunch of different options, from the usual hamburger option, to a diminishing label option (à la Facebook) and more. I eventually decided to try something new.

My option allowed for now for a simple to use navigation (whilst we're building out the feature set inside the account) to then become a more complex expandable option when we have those options to show our users in the future. The idea behind the interaction is each icon in our menu is actually a sub-menu, therefore when a user selects it they get presented with a list from which to select further.

This was just the beginning, we needed icons, colours and more

Each and every icon on the Nested website and new account is created by me inside of Figma. I use Figma over Sketch due to the finer control you get over anchor points for pixel perfect icons.

When designing the account we ran into a problem with our existing colour palette. As we'd designed it with our marketing site and print in mind, we hadn't opted for any strong colours. This meant that we were lacking both a true action colour and an opposite colour, something we could use for errors, signing out etc.

Therefore I decided to expand our colour palette. I'd already defined our colour palette using a HSL setup, therefore expanding it from here should be nice and easy.

I decided to expand our Once In A Blue Moon colour to create our new action colour and our Everything's Peachy to create our secondary colour.