Web App • UX/UI • Design Sprint
Generative UI Hackathon
During our company's annual Hackathon, our team tackled the challenge: "How do we help first-time buyers into homes?" Our aim was to create innovative solutions using new technologies such as generative UI and integrating AI functionality.
Our team of six, included frontend and backend developers and myself as the design lead, we navigated the problem space to deliver a final MVP solution. The Hackathon spanned five half days, culminating in a win for our team!
Understand
Our team all face the challenges of purchasing a home. Through exercises we identified four key pain points we wanted to address:
01
Rising prices: Rapidly increasing house prices and living costs.
03
Lack of awareness: Uncertainty about alternative ownership options like co-ownership or fractional ownership.
02
Bank requirements: Increasing difficulty in meeting loan qualifications.
04
Single income struggles: Difficulty for single income earners to meet bank requirements.
The problem
First home buyers need a more accessible pathway to homeownership as saving for a deposit is challenging amidst rising property prices and living costs.
The hypothesis
If first home buyers have access to alternative financial support, then they will have greater success in purchasing their first home.
Idea
Our idea, was to develop a platform that enables home buyers to find investors to help fund the purchase of a property.
We wanted to reimagine the housing market and provide multiple avenues for home buyers to get on the property ladder. Home buyers would have a more accessible pathway by being able to source funds by selling shares in a property. In return investors would receive a share of the property value and profit from house appreciation over time. We imagined investors could also buy and sell shares at any time to other investors. This provides another avenue for home buyers to grab a share of the housing market if they only had a little to invest.
Competitor audit
Our research highlighted existing co-ownership and fractional ownership frameworks. We identified that many competitors require ownership of an existing property or are managed by private organisations. This insight presented an opportunity to focus specifically on first-time home buyers.
Prototype
Some features included leveraging new AI technology such as AI chat assistant and property value forecasting through integrating OpenAi
The application was built using new generative UI software and Azure services. It was important to explore use cases for AI technology and how it can improve the buyers experience. Through utilising property and realestate data we could predict annual house appreciation and provide detailed breakdowns to investors.
Property forecasting using AI
Listing a property user flow
Results
Our innovative approach and effective implementation won us the Hackathon at Jade, validating our efforts and showcasing the potential of our solution in aiding first-time homebuyers.
Personal challenges
One of the key challenges I faced was stepping back and allowing others to design and develop pages independently, without my direct input. Due to a tight timeline, we couldn't afford to wait for a fully polished set of designs before starting development. Instead, we divided the pages defined by our user flow among the team to begin work immediately. Despite the perfectionist in me, it was remarkable to see how generative UI tools enabled the creation of high-quality outputs. To my surprise, many of the pages produced by the team surpassed what I could have achieved within the same timeframe.
Check our teams recap below:
