Project type: Responsive Web App // Client: Stilio // Employer: Smashing Boxes
In 2020 Stilio rebranded to “Rocket Photo” and focused their offering to provide white-label solutions for national brokerages. The application is no longer available.
THE CHALLENGE
A problem with scale
Stilio is a New Orleans based startup that facilitates real estate photography to agents or home sellers. In the four years the company had been running, it had expanded to 10 states, employing six salespeople and over 50 photographers. But Stilio ran into a scaling issue; the process was very manual, regional and scaling from large markets to a nationwide range was too costly and time consuming to succeed.
For the initial launch, we were tasked with designing and building an online marketplace from scratch focusing on the photographer’s experience. The client strongly believed if photographers could be onboarded quickly, real-estate agents would follow.
With the new experience, photographers can create profiles that showcase their portfolio, equipment, and pricing, giving them exposure to significantly more potential clients and work. Stilio also allows agents to create a specific booking for a listing location by selecting a photographer who is available for the time and place set by the agent’s search. Photographers can upload the finished photos, agents can download the completed photos, and payment can be processed all through Stilio.
MY ROLE ON THIS PROJECT
Understand: Discovery research, user Interviews, journey mapping
Analyze: Opportunity statements, design synthesis (research summary)
Design: Facilitated design workshops, sketching exercises, user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity prototyping, user design critique, design system, UI and interaction design
Validate: Facilitated user testing sessions
Workshop Facilitation
We conducted a two day client workshop to better understand the business requirements, understand the users and their current painpoints. Participants included business stakeholders, real estate photographers and realtors. We addressed the future-state workflow, ideated on possible solutions, and sketched out the key user flows that would be instrumental in the first product release. We focused our efforts on defining onboarding, user portfolio creation, product creation, manage scheduling, using Stilio’s invoicing and billing features and accessing Stilio’s photo/video editing services.
Transferring our workflow sketches to user flows allowed us to visually walk through every step of a user flow to ensure that we didn’t forget anything in our requirements or designs. And our stakeholders got an early glimpse into the final product, so they could validate the approach from a business and operational standpoint, allowing us to gain buy-in and alignment before moving into design and development.
User Flows
Early-access test launch
Populating the platform with photographers during the initial launch was key. Our focus was on ease of use, reducing friction and providing clear context through out the experience.
An early-access test launch to California photographers resulted in significant adoption. In a one month period over 600 photographers were registered. Stilio now has more photographers than any other real estate photography marketplace in the nation.
Photographer dashboard with reports, in-app messaging, appointment calendar.
Product selection and pricing.
Portfolio creation
Component Library
The Stilio design system includes all reusable UI components.
The benefits were significant. They included a huge increase in speed, since we’re working with pre-developed wireframes. Iterative design is simply faster when using pre-designed reusable components. Design system and library built with Semantic UI.
