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The way we buy homes changed.
A settlement turned a signature into the first step of buying a home.
When the rules changed, every buyer working with a HomeServices of America agent suddenly had a legal document in front of them before they'd even seen a house. Commissions were still there, but now they had to be talked about and agreed to up front.
A lot of people saw it as more paperwork. My thinking was that this is the moment a buyer decides if they trust their agent, so that's where I wanted to start.
Powered by technology. Led by people.
Other companies were building big apps that cut the agent out. HomeServices went the other way and leaned on what it already had, its own mortgage, insurance and title companies. The brand promise became the complete real estate experience, and OnePoint was where a buyer would actually see that.
HomeServices' larger technology strategy. One connected platform for agents, brokerage leaders and the enterprise, replacing dozens of tools and logins.
I kept coming back to that line and it became my brief. OnePoint was never going to replace the agent. I wanted it to make the agent easier to reach, make the next step obvious and make everyone on the deal feel like one team.
Eight places to check. One stressed buyer.
Before I opened Figma.
Before I designed any screens I went through the paper side of it. I marked up the documents buyers sign, sat down with agents, looked at what the market data said and then took all of it into a workshop with my team and the client. This is what that first step looked like.
The paper trail.
I printed out one brokerage's buyer packet and went through it with a highlighter. It was 17 pages, six documents and disclosure rules for two states. Anywhere I got stuck I wrote down a question, mostly what a buyer needs to understand on that page and what has to stay word for word for legal.
What I brought to the agents.
The kickoff notes had a lot of assumptions in them. I pulled out the five that kept coming up, wrote each one down as a hypothesis and brought them into my conversations with agents. Each one ended up leading to at least one concept.
What buyers are up against.
I didn't want to go only off a handful of conversations, so I looked at the market data too. It lined up with what agents were telling us. Buyers are older and more careful, the process is long and stressful, and the paperwork is hard for most people to read.
The whole journey, on one wall.
In the workshop we mapped every stage from the first invite to getting the keys. For each one we wrote down what the buyer is doing, how we think they feel, what's broken today and the concept that could fix it.
Nine concepts came out of it.
We wrote each concept as a "how might we" and tied it back to one of the hypotheses. Laying them out like this helped us see what mattered to buyers, what mattered to agents and where those overlapped.
Rough wires first.
Once we agreed on the concepts, I sketched the key screens in low fidelity with no color or branding, just the structure, the words and the order things happen in. I grouped them by moment in the journey so we could review one stretch at a time.
From invitation to keys, in one place.
A better experience for buyers starts with better tools for agents.
When the agent does something it shows up for the buyer, and when the buyer does something it shows up in the agent's pipeline. Tap through it.
The brand is warm. The product had to be clear.
The OnePoint palette looks great in a campaign, but yellow doesn't work for buttons. White text on Golden Yellow fails accessibility and so does yellow text on white. So I put together a product color strategy where the brand colors stay for expression and one deep blue handles the buttons and actions.
One platform. Many brokerage names.
Buyers know their local company, not HomeServices. So each brokerage's name had to lead while the product underneath stayed the same. I wrote rules for what can change (the header lockup, the agent's brand, invitations) and what can't (actions, status colors and the agreement flow).
Honest about what shipped, clear about what's next.
Not everything on this page is live, and I didn't want to pretend it was. So I split it into four groups: what actually went out, what I checked with real agents and documents, what I'm proposing, and how we'd measure it once it's built.
The screens were honestly the easier part. Most of my time went into getting the brokerage, mortgage, insurance, legal and brand teams to agree on one story, then making that story simple enough for a buyer at their kitchen table.
Want to
see more?
Reach out and I’ll walk you through more of my work, including projects for Disney, Wolf & Shepherd, Franklin Templeton, Block One, and JPMorgan.
Reach out to view more of my portfolio work – including projects from Disney, Wolf & Shepherd, Franklin Templeton, Block One, and JPMorgan.
Current availability
We’re open for business and new collaborations.
Current availability
We’re open for business and new collaborations.