149 Photos

Understanding new home buyers in order to facilitate a deeply engaging and emotional buying experience

Practice:

User Interviews
Moderated User Testing
Affinity Mapping
Wireframing

How can we foster a positive home building experience in an uncertain economy?

149 Photos is a platform that allows new construction home builders to share weekly foundation-to-finish photos with their home buyers—eliminating the manual effort required to develop deep connections with their customers. Their online Home Buyer Portal enables home buyers to engage with updated photos of their home as it’s being constructed, limiting the need for back and forth communication and fostering a positive emotional engagement.

Context

71% of home buyers said they were unsatisfied with the level of communication from their builders

The Challenge

The unprecedented fluctuations in demand, labor shortages, and construction delays caused by the 2020 pandemic had lasting and unpredictable effects on the housing market—making it a prime time to investigate how these changes were affecting the home buyer’s experience.

Three purple and lavender pie charts displaying demographic data. The first chart shows ages: 37% are 18-34, 60% are 35-54, and 5% are 55+. The second chart shows races: 50% White, 20% Black, 13% Hispanic, 10% Asian, 7% Indian. The third chart shows gender: 74% Female, 26% Male.

Participant Demographics: The participant pool closely mirrored the broader demographic distribution of home owners and key influencers—typically women—who drive research and decision making in the home buying process.

Thirty participants ranging from 149 Photos Users, to Prospective Home Buyers, to non-149 Home Buyers were interviewed on their unique experiences with new home construction and provided feedback on the existing Home Buyer Portal.

Interviews

A complex diagram of colorful interconnected sticky notes with different themes and titles related to project planning, communication, and progress tracking.

1,000 Observations Later…

A set of three documents with colorful headers, one purple, one blue, and one green, stacked slightly offset. The front document discusses sharing visual documentation to save trips, including a bar graph with a caption about home buyers being away from their new home for more than an hour.

Interview observations were synthesized into key insights around platform usage, builder communication, and the overall homebuying journey. These findings—grounded in both qualitative and quantitative data—not only validated the value of the 149 Photos service, but also revealed targeted improvements to enhance the Home Buyer Portal experience.

Infographic titled 'How do home buyers use the portal?' with three purple sections: 'How it's used,' 'What isn't used,' and 'Wishes,' detailing home buyers' behaviors, limitations, and desires in using a real estate portal.

Portal Interaction Insights: The participants that were 149 Photos users demonstrated their use of the platform, pointing out areas for improvement, most used and unused features.

Diagram with circles titled 'Simplicity,' 'Illumination,' 'Transparency,' 'Storytelling,' 'Personalization,' and 'Consistency,' each accompanied by descriptive text on home buyer engagement and experience.

Design Principles

The process of building a new home is long, expensive, and emotional. That’s why it was important to identify a set of guidelines for crafting experiences for home buyers: Simplicity, Illumination, Transparency, Storytelling, Personalization, and Consistency. This ensured the consideration of the end user in our design process as well as how to communicate with them.

Our learnings pointed to new and improved use cases. We imagined a new Home Buyer Portal by wireframing each use case and guided the development of the second generation.

Wireframes

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