HomeLight — 2020–2023
Process, Data & Documentation
Building the design culture, knowledge infrastructure, and systems to support a prop tech company merging three separate products into a single real estate operating system.
Introduction
HomeLight is a prop tech company founded in 2012. Initially built around matching home buyers with the right real estate agents, the company decided to expand into the entire home purchasing process — finding an agent, engaging with the market, and closing the financial transaction.
To cover the latter two stages, HomeLight acquired SF-based Disclosures.io (where I served as Lead Designer) and NYC-based mortgage startup Eave Inc. The challenge then became unifying these three products into a comprehensive, end-to-end real estate operating system — while simultaneously cultivating a new company culture that bridged its biz dev roots with a contemporary, design-led development process.
To get started, we focused on three core areas: creating a product knowledge repo filled to the brim with research and design artifacts; building HomeLight's first proper Design System; and expanding, improving, and standardizing design file format and documentation.
01 — Research & Systems Mapping
Understanding the Challenges & Mapping the Terrain
Historically, the core of HomeLight's UX happened on the phone. Digital interfaces existed for onboarding, tracking, and internal ops — but the company's money was made in real-time calls between agents and clients. So that's where attention went.
Parts of the website had been built in a high-speed "design-as-a-service" model, responding to business needs as they arose. Similar components had been built multiple times in slightly different ways by siloed business units. There was minimal documentation, and limited visibility into how data moved through the system.
Through detailed data diagrams, user flows, information architecture maps, and service blueprints for existing products, we built a knowledge base for each piece of the site — what it was, how it worked, and how it connected to everything else.
Agent experience workflows — Web
TRUS: RESPA compliance workflow
Borrower application flow
02 — Design System
Creating a Design System
With the Design Team growing and several big new projects emerging from the integration of HomeLight, Disclosures.io, and Eave, it made sense to build HomeLight's first proper Design System.
We brought in interested developers to help plan scope and select technologies, and settled on using the Figma plugin Storybook to connect our master component library with the live implementation of the code.
For this first version, the team kept it simple — focusing on foundations: type, color, buttons, inputs, toasts. Confining our first pass largely to "atomic" elements with a handful of frequently-used "molecules" like modals and wizard flows made the most sense. More complex components could come later.
Design System walkthrough
03 — Documentation & Delivery
Documentation & Delivery
As remote work continued and the HomeLight Engineering team grew substantially through hires in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, the need for consistently formatted and clearly documented design files became pressing.
We built a subset of our Design System dedicated to laying out and marking up Figma files, then set standards for how to use them. At minimum, a finished delivery file included visual design, UX flows, documented components, and a functional prototype — used both for dev handoff and for running usability tests through Grain or Usertesting.com.
Example 1 — Urgent Escrow Leads
A feature allowing HomeLight's Sales operators to surface and prioritize transactions approaching critical deadlines. Prototype, flows, and full component documentation delivered to spec.
Example 2 — Sales App Universal Comms Panel
A unified communications interface enabling Sales operators to manage all client and agent communication from a single panel. Buttonless tray design with contextual actions surfaced on demand.
04 — Interaction Design
Closing Out on a Fun One
While this case study has been mostly about team-level process work, I wouldn't feel right without sharing the most fun interaction I got to design at HomeLight: a DIY Boolean constructor for Sales operators.
The "Task Automation" feature allowed users to define specific conditions and rules in their transactions — whereby new Tasks could be automatically created and assigned to the responsible parties. For example: when any part of the HL system learns that a client signed a Listing Agreement, a Task to provide property photographs is automatically created in both dashboards, and auto-resolves upon upload.
This reduced cognitive load on Sales operators while sparing developers from hand-building dozens of individual Tasks. Procedures vary state to state; this system could adapt.
Task Automations — DIY Boolean rule constructor