Raise is a commercial real estate brokerage “for the 21st century”.

I joined Raise as their third product designer in August 2019, right before they raised their seed round of $6.5M in October a couple months later.

They were investing in the design team to scale with their major initiatives: An upcoming rebrand of its former name HelloOffice, expansions into new markets and verticals, and high-quality product development.

As of June 2022, Raise operates coast-to-coast in 5 markets with clients like Palantir and Twitch, offering a range of services. The product team has grown from 9 to 16 members (with the latest hire being the VP of Engineering).

The Industry

The CRE World

The brokerage world is competitive and fast-paced. As one Raise broker put it, “Every edge matters.” Half of the work they do is supporting their clients through the intricacies of finding office space, and the other half is developing their business pipelines via constant networking and market research.

On the client’s side, finding (or subleasing out) an office space can be one of the most expensive and complex processes that a company faces, regardless of size.

Even as the landscape changes in response to COVID’s impact on how companies operate, real estate continues to be a critical investment that anyone from small startups to global companies such as Google can make.

The Product

Dealroom

Dealroom is Raise’s own two-sided platform that makes it easy for Raise experts and clients to search for future offices. It defines a core part of Raise’s “edge” as an online space where brokers can manage their business and collaborate asynchronously with their clients.

Currently, Dealroom is expanding its capabilities to also help our teams and clients manage, develop, and run current and upcoming workplaces. It’s an example of the industry’s move away from email threads, PDFs, and attached Excel sheets to something more real-time and immediately actionable.

The problem

Dealroom was a powerful product. However, the client side needed to evolve.

Clients can use Dealroom to gain transparency into and control within a formerly opaque process. They can review listings, view detailed market data, and track proposals - all supplied with the brokers’ personal curative touch. However, its design no longer worked for how Raise wanted to grow.

Workplace and Project Management teams were signing on to join as their own verticals, and there was an increased reliance on mobile and tablet views for our on-the-go brokers. The current design could not support the product goals of real-time collaboration, a responsive platform as business differentiator, and increased feature offerings.

For a brokerage that works predominantly with tech clientele, Dealroom’s first impression sent a message about Raise as a whole. And of course product usability defined overall adoption. As Raise evolved, Dealroom had to follow suit. 

The solution

Redesign Dealroom to help brokers look great, empower clients to be active partners, and scale product for the future.

Throughout the 6-months long design effort, I helped shaped the complete UX/UI overhaul and mobile web optimization of Dealroom’s client side.

I worked alongside Rob West (Head of Design) and Jillian Chien (Product Designer). Rebranding was done through Character, a third-party brand marketing agency based out of San Francisco.

Design sprints from April to June 2020.

Brokers were full of ideas that charged excitement and buy-in from all around. The design team ran multiple sprints to capture these thoughts, and also to generate our own.

I created countless wireframes and the occasional prototype, rapidly adjusting as needed between rounds with stakeholders to visually record what we learned.

A scalable navigation structure.

Our leadership aimed to own the full client journey by providing end-to-end service for their clients, and so next to build would be our lease administration feature. A new navigation tier meant future features would have a home in our product while existing cohesively alongside existing features. 

The left navigation would be the go-to location for high-level functions and features. Top navigation would break out secondary pages as needed in the form of tabs, with a clear page header. This pattern continues to work intuitively today.

A home dashboard.

On the new home page, clients can see all their ongoing projects at any given time. It has space for quick access to important details. And it has also become a high-visibility point for cross-selling services and features.

Dealroom will accommodate multiple kinds of “deals”, or more accurately, projects. A client might search for a new hub in Denver but need kitchen improvements to their existing San Francisco office. 

Sense of progress and process.

We refined what actions happen at what stages, giving clients better and actually actionable reasons to sign on and get involved. On the overview page, clients get clear calls to action to do what they’re expected to do: Review new listings, leave feedback, green light a new proposal, and notify whether they’ll be attending a tour or not.

Design systems and useful components

We worked with engineering in parallel to construct new components with actual longevity and recycled use cases. For example, listing cards: We designed two styles, which each work ideally for two different scenarios. Thoughtful design effort led to more willingness from engineers to tackle design debt in parallel with future projects, AKA less tech debt.

We used Storybook as a way to have a single point of reference shared between disciplines, and I regularly maintained the design system on the Figma side.

We went with 320px as our smallest screen size, knowing even our brokers might be using older phone models. Whatever version the smartphone, clients would be covered.

We designed for 768px, 1040px, 1280px, 1440px (our desktop default to suit 13-inch MacBooks), and 1680px. And we bumped up the text size and moved to darker text colors to prevent eye strain or flat-out unreadability.

 THE outcome

Brokers jumped in, and client engagement rose due to a smoother user experience. Not only did Dealroom look great, but also the new design would start reshaping the product as a whole.