Strike Hub
Strike has a customer-facing platform called Strike Hub.
As work on the platform was never-ending and iterations to improve customer experience were at the forefront in my mind, I had a privilege to be a UI Lead on the project.
The “Old” Strike Hub & Empathising
The existing platform was fine. It worked, there were no dead ends, and it did what it was supposed to. Suspected problems only proved true when we ran a survey with Hotjar, called Hub Happiness Survey (credits here to my PM with this idea) which showed numerous flaws the company wasn’t even aware of.
This feedback was pure gold, and we all knew it. It was time to get to work. But how do you create a system for both Buyers and Sellers, people who haven’t got a mortgage or the ones who have 10 properties for sale?
Thousands of frames protected by Mark
What followed was tens of files, hundreds of pages, and thousands of frames in Figma. Days spent completely immersed in files and spitting ideas.
Countless tests, user interviews, mad and ambitious ideas, crazy and weird.
Above you see frames surrounded by Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook. We borrowed some ideas from them, so Mark was appointed the protector of our ‘Bin’, where we would store discarded ideas.
When I say those were long days, they were. But they were nothing if not fun!
Biggest pain points
“The ship is burning, and we must first make sure that it can stay above water.”
We knew that addressing everything all at once was impossible, so we first settled on establishing baselines that could then be iterated upon and transformed into future solutions.
Mode Switch
You might remember the question posed above; “How do we cater for both the Buyer and Seller, and how do we manage multiple properties?”
Catering to Extreme users is good for generating income and early adopters, but we wanted a service that’s good for everyone.
What resulted was mode switch, a crucial element of the Dashboard where you can easily navigate between modes.
Dashboard, Navigation
The vision was clear; Dashboard is the place to be. Here, everything from updates on your properties or your advert going live would come to a user’s attention through Smart Summary, and countless other simple solutions implemented throughout the experience.
From there, users could navigate through Messages, Viewings, Offers and Move Ready. It turned out to be a clear, intuitive experience that received high user praise when released (this is also due to incredible work by developers and QA who made sure everything would work as expected).
Challenges & Takeaways
Like any project of this magnitude, you do not realise how much work there is to do until you start digging. Oftentimes, the digging never stops, but still you navigate through those tunnels with help of QA team, developers and every single person included in running the company to make sure every base is covered.
It was a privilege and honour to have that much input over such a big-audience product, and one that taught me more than Design books ever did.
User is King. That’s my takeaway and advice; your user will tell you everything that’s wrong with your service, and it is job of those like me or you to make sure the service you create serves the user, but is also sustainable for the company and people who work for it.
And that’s precisely why Strike Hub redesign was a success.