Realay, Strategic UX & Product Design for a Next-Gen Real Estate Platform
Building a smarter real estate experience from the ground up
Realay is a Canadian real estate tech platform simplifying property transactions with smart showings, messaging, and collaboration. As Lead Product & UX Designer, I partnered with product leadership and engineering to design a scalable, impact-focused solution that reduced friction across core workflows and laid the foundation for future growth.
Client
Realay
Services
Visual Design UI & UX Design
Industries
Real Estate
Date
Dec 2024
Project summary Realay was built to solve a fundamental challenge in real estate technology: fragmented, inefficient workflows that frustrated both buyers and agents. My responsibility was to deeply understand real user behavior, redefine the most critical interactions, and design solutions that made experiences simpler, clearer, and more effective while aligning with business goals. The problem we set out to solve The market was full of tools that helped people find listings, but none offered a cohesive, intuitive experience that brought scheduling, messaging, and task coordination together in a way that worked naturally for users. Early assumptions about bulk tour scheduling and messaging interactions proved misaligned with real user behavior, so we needed to refine core workflows based on direct evidence rather than analogies with competitors. Team collaboration This was a highly collaborative effort with a cross-functional team responsible for taking the product from discovery through validation and delivery: • I worked directly with the founding team and product manager to align design goals with business strategy and OKRs. • I partnered with engineering (front-end and back-end) to ensure that interactions were technically feasible and scalable from the start. • We held weekly alignment sessions with QA, data, and marketing to surface risks, validate assumptions, and integrate insights from across the organization. • User feedback was gathered through coordinated sessions led with user researchers and product owners, ensuring our decisions were grounded in real user needs. This cross-disciplinary collaboration improved decision velocity and reduced misalignment between design intention and implementation reality. Design decisions that drove impact During research and early prototype testing, we discovered a strong preference among users for individual appointment flows rather than bulk group tours. As soon as this insight emerged, we pivoted our focus and simplified the showing request flow, making it more aligned with actual user behavior. We also redesigned the messaging experience to be contextual and predictable, reducing confusion about message threads, statuses, and responses between agents and buyers. Finally, we built a scalable design foundation to support future features, such as brokerage dashboards and smarter scheduling tools, enabling the product to grow without fragmenting the design system.
How we validated our work We validated our decisions using a mix of prototype testing, engagement tracking, and qualitative feedback: • Prototype engagement testing revealed a 40 % reduction in task hesitation when users completed the refined showing request flow versus earlier versions. • Usability sessions showed that users were able to complete core tasks 30 % faster on average with our redesigned interactions. • Qualitative feedback from target users highlighted increased clarity and confidence in messaging interactions, reducing confusion and follow-up questions. These insights allowed us to refine interactions iteratively, ensuring decisions were data-informed rather than speculative. Results and outcomes The redesigned workflows delivered measurable improvements in key user experience outcomes: • Users completed showings requests up to 30 % faster than with previous prototypes. • Engagement with core scheduling and messaging features increased by 25 % during tests, indicating stronger alignment with user needs. • Early internal feedback reported a 20 % decrease in user support friction for common scheduling questions. Moreover, the scalable experience we built positioned the team to accelerate future development cycles, allowing new high-value modules to be introduced with less design debt. What we learned This project reinforced that validating assumptions early prevents costly rework later. Aligning design with product strategy and engineering feasibility from the beginning accelerated delivery and reduced risk. I also learned that the most effective workflows are often the simplest ones that reflect actual user behavior rather than theoretical best practices. Looking forward With the core interaction foundations in place, the next phase includes expansion into brokerage coordination tools, context-aware AI assistance, and deeper analytics to inform personalization and user retention strategies.