Helping real estate agents stay on top of their leads
Company
OJO Labs
Role
Design intern
Duration
2 months
Background
Real estate agents juggle dozens of leads and rely on notes to track milestones, preferences, and personal details. OJO’s notes feature was barebones and rarely used, so agents often kept notes elsewhere. This limited our visibility into lead interactions and reduces the agents' engagement with the platform.
The Problem
Low adoption: OJO’s notes were underused and did not offer much value.
Low motivation: Agents weren’t compelled to take notes in OJO.
Limited insight into lead interactions: Without notes in the platform, our team couldn’t fully understand agent–lead interactions or support agents effectively.
Research
To understand the agents' existing note-taking habits, I interviewed 5 OJO Agents to understand their workflow better.
Reliance on CRMs for note-taking
Agents mainly rely on their CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software) to take notes, making OJO’s notes secondary at best.
Note-taking styles vary
Some agents jot detailed notes right after every interaction, while others batch less-detailed notes later from memory.
Agents capture both big and small details
From call history and personal touches to milestones and first-call criteria, agents keep track of a wide range of information.
The key insight was that agents heavily rely on their existing CRM tools, and their habits are unlikely to change. OJO’s notes feature must provide complementary value rather than compete with their existing workflow.
The Proposal
01. Lead Timeline
Agents in OJO’s program get access to high-quality leads, but to stay in the program and continue receiving them, they must regularly provide updates on their interactions. These updates help OJO monitor engagement and ensure leads are being actively worked.
Currently, the updates weren’t visible anywhere in the app, which led to my first proposal: turn them into a running timeline that provides agents with a quick, lightweight history of interactions without extra effort.
My thinking was that if we give them a detailed timeline and record of interactions with minimal effort required, they’ll be more compelled to maintain the record—and the timeline would also be useful for quickly checking lead information in OJO.
Trade-off: Simple and low-effort, but only captures general milestones rather than full notes.
02. Call Notes Prompt
Since many interactions with leads happen over phone calls, my second proposal was to automatically log calls and prompt agents to record details immediately afterward. This helps capture small but important information before it’s forgotten.
Trade-off: Captures more detail, but risks introducing new workflows and possibly disrupting CRM habits.
What Made the Cut
After testing both concepts with agents, I learned that:
The lead timeline concept was helpful
Agents liked that the timeline turned routine updates into something helpful without disrupting their workflow, keeping it low-effort and easy to adopt.
Call notes would not fit in the workflow
Agents found the call-logging feature unhelpful because most calls weren’t made from within the OJO app, so I removed this option.
Before this, I felt like I was just making status updates into the void. Seeing them turn into a timeline actually makes them useful.
— Agent at OJO
Reflection
This internship taught me that real impact comes from working with existing workflows, not against them. Since agents relied on CRMs, OJO’s opportunity was to complement those habits. It also showed me the importance of grounding design decisions in user research and technical feasibility.