Automating Quality in Strata Reports: Designing to Accelerate Inspections, Set Standards, and Improve Buyer Comprehension

Systemizing Strata Inspections:
Designing to standardize quality in reports
Key Contributions
User Research, User Flows, Wireframing, UI Design, Prototyping
Tools
Figma, Mixpanel, Microsoft Teams, Miro, ChatGPT
THE CHALLENGE

The value of standardizing Strata Reports

Before You Buy (BYB) (formerly Before You Bid) is an Australian company that connects inspectors with real estate agents and potential buyers to streamline the exchange of property due diligence reports.

A key service they offer is facilitating the purchase of Strata Reports, which are typically created by independent inspectors.

These inspectors use different methods in completing their reports, resulting to inconsistent detail and depth across reports. BYB identified an opportunity to standardize these reports, aiming to improve reliability and usability.
Samples of Strata Reports with varied formats
The end product the business wanted was a form builder for inspectors to easily complete reports and expedite the report writing process; additionally, they saw this as an opportunity to collect data on their access to due diligence content.
THE END GOAL
Create a Strata Report form builder for inspectors to
THE RESEARCH PROCESS

What makes a good Strata Report?

Before diving into designing for this new offering, we needed to make sure we were considering the needs of another user: the buyers of the report.
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This is because a good Strata Report assesses a property's financial health, maintenance history, and future plans—and all of this must be easily understood by the buyer reading the report so they can make an informed decision over a property investment.
Photos from interviews conducted
The qualities of a good Strata Report was determined by analyzing top reports and consulting with inspectors, buyers, conveyancers, and stakeholders. Here are key identified users and their pain points for the template we wanted to create:
Property Agents
Struggle with inconsistent report formats, complicating property comparisons.
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Buyers
Reports are overly technical and lengthy, making them difficult to understand.
OUR FIRST GOAL
Simplify reports for better accessibility and comprehension, while preserving essential details for decision-making.

What did we learn

In order to standardize Strata Reports, we began by reviewing existing templates and compiling a list of necessary fields and inputs. These fields were then organized into clear sections, with the overall structure being validated by key stakeholders.
Collection of reports analyzed
Identification of key fields in report
INSIGHT
Throughout our research, we learned that a crucial consideration was to maintain the report's neutrality. Despite the business wanting to provide a comprehensive report for buyers, we learned that inspectors will always be wary of liability and therefore would try to avoid any wording that could leave them wrongfully responsible.

This was a crucial bit of information to learn as our reports would always be filled out by inspectors and we wanted to make sure that they would be comfortable to use any tool we'd create for them.
Keeping in mind the insights we gathered from our different users, our template was created and featured a few things that helped improve buyers understand the report content, but also keep inspectors comfortable to fill in. I organized key fields into sections and groups and documented definitions, expected answers, errors, etc.
A peek at the spreadsheets organized for this initiative
TESTING OUR TEMPLATE

Setting the standard with our own report template

Through an iterative process with our users, we carefully balanced the intuitive aspects of how inspectors can fill out reports with the clarity buyers needed to understand the reports.
Annotations from feedback sessions
The following are key parts to the template our users found helpful:
Document Checklist
‍Indicates quality of inspection, informs the buyer the documents their inspector had access to.
Glossary
‍Added to clarify jargon, ensuring all buyers, regardless of prior knowledge, can understand all terms used.
Report Summary
‍Highlights the key findings from the inspection, drawing immediate attention to the most critical issues.
Regulations Reference
These are automatically attached to report to inform buyers on relevant property laws.

What did buyers say?

“Compared to [other] Strata reports I’ve seen, it’s well laid out and structured. My struggle with previous reports is that the information was spread all over the place”
- Rob, Property Buyer
“I think it’s good! I like the design of documents reviewed in the report”
- Jacky, Property Buyer
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM

Creating our own form builder for inspectors

Now that we knew buyers would be happy with the information our template presented, we moved on to finally designing the form builder that can help speed up the report writing process for inspectors.

To understand their workflows, we conducted further interviews with Inspectors to understand their behaviors and reviewed existing tools they already use to create their reports. Here are key insights:
Frustration with missing documents
‍They often experience delays in completing reports due to missing documents and unresponsive strata managers, with the follow-up process both frustrating and time-consuming.
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Liability concerns
They stressed their caution during report preparation, where they focus on precise language and specific disclaimers to safeguard themselves against potential liability issues.

Prioritization and feature scoping

With an understanding of how Inspectors create their reports and the tools they use in the process, we identified features we wanted for our own software. We then measured and ranked each feature by three standards: value to users, value to business, and tech feasibility.
Feature prioritization
Feature prioritization helps inform design decisions. For instance, it was decided early on that our templates would not be made customizeable as it would take on too much effort from the engineering team. We opted to prioritize other features, such as auto-save and the live view of reports, which we saw would be more beneficial to our users during the discovery process.

How will users navigate?

A simple sitemap was created to outline user navigation through the software and user flows were designed to illustrate user actions within the software, particularly, how inspectors can create a report from start to finish.
Sitemap diagram
Userflows
WIREFRAMING

Deciding on information architecture

Wireframes were crafted to experiment with different information architecture options. This step allows informed decision-making in designing new screens that effectively help our users in completing tasks and achieving their goals.

DEVELOPING VISUAL DESIGN

Creating our own form builder for inspectors

With the UX process validated, we advanced to the user interface design phase.

A design library was developed with Figma. Below is a sample of the button component created for this project:
Button design update visualized
PROTOTYPING

Testing interaction design

Prototypes were prepared once visual assets were ready. These prototypes were also tested with Inspectors.

What did Inspectors say?

"I feel like when you're looking at a word document, there's so much going on that sometimes you miss things. But here, there's clear steps and they're itemized in a way that it is organized, very well organized...it's pretty cool. I'm enjoying it so far."
- Wes, Strata Inspector
"I like how the preview comes straight up, I like the dropdown selections, and I like the autosave so I don't have to worry about saving it or anything and I can come and go if I had to go away or something"
- Rebecca, Strata Inspector
REFLECTIONS

Design guided by research

This project presented the unique challenge of designing for a country and industry that is completely new to me. The Australian real estate industry has their own set of norms and best practices that I needed to get familiar with quickly.

Nevertheless, creating a research plan and identifying ambiguities upfront was helpful in maintaining a focused discovery process.

I also cannot stress how vital it was to stay closely connected to our users to ensure our project was moving in the right track and that we were always creating a product aligned with user needs.

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