Creating a Better Experience: Designing for the Future of CRE
At Dottid, we place a premium on design. It is at the heart of everything we do. Good design facilitates ease-of-use and accessibility, allowing our clients to adapt to our rapidly changing times. In other words, it gives our clients the edge they need to close deals and thrive in a competitive marketplace.
That’s why we don’t simply design our product for our clients — we design our product with our clients.
Our product is built in partnership with our clients. We believe our clients know exactly what they need, and we value their input to ensure that our engineers are building a product with user-centric design — a product our clients want to use.
By directly engaging with our clients and key industry stakeholders, we are designing the future of Commercial Real Estate.
“User research is the lifeblood of quality design,” said Dottid Designer Kyle Baker. “At Dottid, we seek client feedback early and often throughout the design process — iterating until we are confident we are delivering an unparalleled experience for our users. As a company, we set out knowing there was a better way. Our user-centric approach emboldens our team to continually reinvent what ‘a better way’ can be.”
Our process begins with research. We not only want to know what our clients need — we want to know what they want. That means taking a direct approach, through user feedback interviews, and by gathering input about how clients are experiencing our product from the Client Success and Client Engagement teams. We also research how other tools in the industry are designed to meet these user needs, and we use this research to inform our own designs.
From this research, we prototype product solutions by prioritizing the needs of our users, innovation, and creativity. We validate all of our prototyped designs with our power users before we choose the best concept to build.
As we begin to build a new concept, we collaborate closely with our engineers to refine the designs as needed. Once our design is released, we follow up with our users and Client Success Team to ensure the effectiveness of our design.
And when we say this is a process, we mean it. Recently, our Design Team used this process to streamline the entire design of our platform. We listened when our users shared how they navigated the platform, and we realized we could cut down clicks, empowering our users to work better together and make data-driven decisions that matter. From there, we prototyped designs, reviewed them with our users, and collaborated with our Engineering Team to set the right timeline for these major product changes.
Because of the incredible feedback we received throughout the process, we are excited to announce that our redesigned platform is set to launch on August 17, 2021!
Sean Kier (Software Engineer), Travis Siems (Principal Architect), Daniel Lu (Design Lead)
“As we continued to gain a deeper empathy for our users and insight into real-world workflow, we knew that Dottid needed to be even faster, create more visibility and help teams actually succeed in Commercial Real Estate,” said Dottid Design Lead Daniel Lu. “This redesign is a radical shift in our interface that enables our users to get deals done faster together with their teams by reducing clicks, exposing more relevant data, and shifting to a fresh, collaborative environment that focuses on action and transparent communication in a beautiful and human way.”
Design drives our culture. It is how we connect the needs of our clients with the work of our engineers. It is how we deliver on our commitment to help our clients save time and get deals done. Because design plays such an important role in how we develop our product, we design with the following principles in mind:
Data is the great equalizer. Our product allows decision-makers to make more objective decisions which lead to more accuracy and levels the playing field for everyone involved.
Technology is also a great equalizer. Cutting-edge technology makes the industry more accessible, more affordable, and more intuitive.
Automation boosts accuracy and performance. It fuels efficiency and streamlines processes.
Platforms should be remote-work friendly. Our product is a modern tool able to quickly adapt to alternative work models.
Cybersecurity is more important than ever. Because cybersecurity is a growing concern for most organizations, we prioritize the data security of our clients very seriously.
The value we place on designing our product with our clients, as opposed to for our clients, is why Dottid is a leader in the PropTech space. By regularly designing our product with industry professionals in mind, we are redesigning what it means to be a successful player in the Commercial Real Estate industry.