Lasyprop

In a nutshell...

⭐

0→1 product design for a directory platform, connecting local property contractors to international customers across East and Southeast Asia.

Final Deliverables

User flows, Full design (desktop + mobile), UI library

My Role

Sole Product Designer

Timeframe

3 months

Finding local contractors is a pain for property owners.

❗

Property and business owners in East and Southeast Asia often struggle to find trusted, reliable local contractors.

With decades of previous contracting and real estate development experience in Southeast Asia, the Lasyprop team set out to solve this problem. I was contacted by the Lasyprop team to discover and design the MVP of a marketplace directory platform, connecting local contractors to property owners across borders.

Starting with “scrappy” contextual research

I dug into some Southeast Asian online communities to see how people were finding property contractors to partner with overseas.

From this research, I identified three key pain points that seemed to be the most common:

🤲

Lack of trust

Property owners rely on peers & social media to find contractors, preferring recommended contractors rather than just working “blindly” with a random company

👣

No digital footprint

Local contractors and small businesses usually have little to no online presence, mainly relying on word of mouth and traditional marketing to land customers.

🌐

Language barriers

Overseas property owners want to work with companies that speak both their language and the local language. (Ex. a Singaporean property owner might want to work with a contractor in Japan that is fluent not only in Japanese, but also Mandarin and/or English.)

Exploring similar solutions within the space

In doing some market research, I found that products like Yellowpages or Fastwork had similar pitfalls, not quite addressing the pain points mentioned earlier.

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Were offered only in local language. Ex. Yellowpages Japan, Yellowpages Thailand, Yellowpages Singapore are mostly catered to locals only, being offered in their respective languages.

🫣

Were visually overwhelming. With too much going on with ads and information overload, it made for an unpleasant and confusing browsing experience for potential customers.

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Lacked social proof. Companies were often just listed on platforms without any sort of review or rating system, creating an extra layer of effort for customers to “vibe check” a company.

🔎

Lacked visibility. The lack of images or descriptions in a company’s profile requires a potential customer to put in more work to look into a company, turning away a potential customer.

Our guiding principles

From initial research, I determined a few key principles to guide my solution:

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Trust

Leverage social proof and community to build trust in companies.

🌏

Flexibility

Cater to audiences across geographic and linguistic barriers.

🌱

Simplicity

Stand out in a sea of pop-ups, banners, and CTAs.

Organizing product requirements with Object-Oriented UX (OOUX)

Using OOUX methodology, I defined the “objects” of our product- the key players like our users, companies, services, etc.

Object Map

Mapping the important data relating to each object in a spreadsheet provides a bird’s-eye view of the entire product for myself and stakeholders to align.

Low-fidelity concepts

The OOUX object map helped to inform the basic structures of each page in our product.

Building a basic design system

Using the low-fidelity designs, I first identified the necessary components for the product. This was key for an MVP, as I wanted to be efficient with time and effort for both myself as the designer and for the development team after handoff.

With Material UI as a base, I created the basic components needed in line with Lasyprop’s existing branding. This handy plugin Specs helped a lot with documenting UI components!

Preparing for handoff!

To ensure the development process goes smoothly, I annotated all of the main user flows with key components, expected behaviour, and important interactions.

Find the right contractor for you with targeted, direct search.

Highlighting a business with company profiles

A detailed company page gives customers key information about the company, along with social proof using a Google rating (if available) and platform-specific rating.
It also provides business owners with little online presence a platform to showcase their services, past work, and supporting information.

Making it easy not just for customers, but business owners

A comprehensive settings page allows business owners to easily manage their account and business profile.

Lasyprop is offered in multiple languages common to the region - English, Thai, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese to start.

What's next for Lasyprop?

The Lasyprop platform is currently under development. Having the platform designed will allow the Lasyprop team to raise seed funding and demo to investors as they prepare to launch.

Considering future versions...

As the product is first launched, I would keep an eye on two key metrics: first, the company profile completion rate to track the success of the onboarding experience and profile editing experience. Second, the click-through rate on potential customers contacting companies would perhaps be indicative of the overall experience for customers browsing.