ESPX - Enterprise CRM

Client: Eastdil Secured

Role: Lead UX Designer

Responsibilities: UX/UI design, user flows, wireframing, visual design, documentation

Duration: 2 years, 2 months (9/15 - 12/17)

Tools:

The story begins…

It was a dark and stormy night, the alarm on my phone announcing 1:30am like some digital town crier. Tim, Ron and I sat in the office conference room, along with the remnants of a rotisserie chicken that had been our late-night sustenance. We poured bleary-eyed over whiteboard scribbles, requirements docs and my latest designs for the Companies workflow. Bodies tired, minds alert, keen to solve the puzzle before us.

Like detectives assembling the story of a missing person from myriad scraps of evidence, we were determined to crack the complexities of this code. We had to.

We’d recently partnered with a huge commercial real-estate brokerage with offices around the world, and our challenge was to replace their 15-year-old CRM platform and replace it with something modern, flexible, efficient, and user-friendly. 500 employees were counting on us to make sure our solution would streamline their workflow, and the client, already one of the top brokerages in the world, wanted to be #1.

My imaginative and insightful concept designs had helped win us the account. Now I had to deliver the goods.

The pressure was most definitely on.

Overview

ESX is a comprehensive enterprise CRM platform used by Eastdil Secured, one of the top commercial real-estate brokerages in the world. Their previous platform dated back to 2000, and its complexity and lack of a modern, flexible, user-friendly interface plagued teams across the business. Developing and deploying modern software technology to track, organize, analyze, and communicate deal information was, and remains, a top priority of the company. Eastdil Secured partnered with Lighthouse Software to re-platform their existing application to a modern system that would empower its deal teams to get real-time market intelligence and internal visibility across all lines of business and offices.

Team

Tim Michalski (CEO/Chief Engineer), Ron Wilson (PM/BA), Adam Eslinger (FED), Jon Raymer, Ryan Voronyak, & Nu Maniphanh (Back-End), Alan Baltier (Database Engineer)

Goals

  • Provide a modern, intuitive, and human-centered interface for deal teams to process and track sales, properties, personnel, and communicate throughout the organization.

  • Absorb complexity by creating clear workflows for employees managing different phases of a project

  • Boost visibility and business intelligence by using dashboards to prioritize information and activity

  • Minimize tech debt potential moving forward

Highlights:

13%

Lift in sales within the first year after release

29%

Increase in team efficiency during deal cycle

500+

Employees currently using the system worldwide

Project Details

Background

  • Eastdil Secured partnered with Lighthouse Software to replatform and redesign their outdated internal CRM.

  • The original platform, built in 2000, was complex and required modern solutions for usability.

  • The CRM housed intricate data on companies, properties, people, finances, and communications.

Understanding Complexity and User Needs

  • Conducted interviews with team members at various levels: brokers, analysts, administrative staff, finance experts, and IT.

  • Created three personas to encapsulate user pain points and needs.

  • Learned about the commercial real estate deal cycle to account for various deal scenarios.

Concept designs to inspire the imagination

  • Initiated UX sketching while collaborating with engineers on data structure.

  • Used sketches to facilitate discussion and maintain a problem-solving mindset with stakeholders.

  • Explored design systems, ultimately opting for Google Material Design for compatibility with AngularJS.

A series of smartphone-shaped post-it notes on a whiteboard with notes showing collaboration on a project

Beginning with the blueprints

  • Developed lo-fi wireframes for each workflow and presented them in a digital sketchbook.

  • Kept wireframes intentionally vague to focus on user paths through the deal process.

  • Experienced challenges due to unclear expectations around progress and output.

Hindsights:

I didn’t do a great job of setting expectations or advocating for a proper design process. Because I’d chosen to make such a thing out of the sketches, it was suggested that the client would feel like we weren’t making progress if the wireframes essentially matched the sketches. Chalk it up to still being kind of new in my career, and not having had great examples of UX leadership up to this point, but it was on me to insist that we go through with proper wireframes, and I didn’t do that.

This would come back to bite us later on in the project.

Design Process

  • Utilized Photoshop for mockups, initially receiving positive feedback from the client.

  • Advocated for simplicity amidst frequent client-driven changes and conflicting stakeholder requirements.

  • Strived to absorb complexities internally while unifying stakeholder requests.

Collaboration with Development

  • Worked closely with the development team as they iteratively built sections of the platform.

  • Conducted regular check-ins for QA and to ensure accessibility and user experience standards were met.

  • Created a style guide and a daily digest email template for client communication.

Outcomes and Learnings

  • Delivered a comprehensive CRM system that improved data organization, accessibility, and adaptability.

  • The new system contributed to a 13% increase in sales within the first year of its release in 2018.

  • Enhanced processing speed for brokerage teams, streamlining sales steps and phases.

If I were to work on this project in 2024, I would:

  • Focus more on mapping user workflows and wireframing, and less on sketching.

  • Emphasized the importance of developing thorough wireframes as a common reference point, and treat them as a source of truth.

  • Use a modern design tool like Figma, and implement a design system early on to ensure cohesive and efficient development processes.

  • Personally I’m far more confident in myself and my abilities than I was in 2016 and 2017. I would leverage my experience to advocate for the users, the design, and to try to bridge the gaps between business and design.

Overall, the project was a success, but it was also a huge learning experience. These challenges highlighted the importance of a thorough wireframe process, strict scope management, and the right design tools for complex projects.