Company
OJO Labs
Role
Product Design Intern
Duration
2 months
OJO Labs is a real estate tech company that matches home buyers and sellers with vetted agents. As a product design intern on OJO Lab's Select Agent team, I worked on tools for the real estate agents using OJO's platform.
The problem
Real estate agents often juggle dozens of buyers and sellers at once, each with different needs and at different stages of the process. To keep track of these relationships, agents rely heavily on notes. These include anything from budget preferences and must-haves to small personal details that help build trust (like their dog’s name… nothing builds trust faster than asking about Cookie 🐶).
When I joined OJO, there was already a notes feature for agents to track their lead relationships, but it was barely used. Our hypothesis for why: the feature was too limited and provided little value over other tools, so most didn't bother.
The existing notes feature: a simple text input with no structure, categories, or context.
Why this was worth solving
This wasn't just a matter of an underused feature. OJO provides agents with high-quality leads, but in exchange, OJO needed visibility on how engaged agents actually are with those leads. Notes are one of the clearest signals of that engagement. If agents weren't leaving notes, that signal disappears.
If we could get agents to take notes, we could gain:
A clearer to evaluate agent engagement with leads, which determines whether they continue receiving high-quality leads
A data channel into agent-lead relationships that could inform better decisions for the team
Research
To understand more about why agents weren't using the OJO notes feature, and how agents currently track their leads, I interviewed 5 OJO agents about their workflows. The findings:
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 lighter notes later from memory.
Agents capture both big and small details. Some agents jot detailed notes right after every interaction, while others batch lighter notes later from memory.
The key insight
Agents' habits and workflows weren't going to change, so OJO's notes needed to provide complementary value rather than compete with existing tools.
Defining the Problem & Exploring Ideas
Research reframed the challenge for me. It wasn't "how do we get them to use our notes feature instead?" it was:
How might we encourage agents to leave notes on OJO, without asking them to change their existing habits?
With that in mind, I explored two directions:
Proposal 1: Lead Timeline
My first idea built on something that already existed but wasn't visible. Agents in the Select Agent program are already required to leave status updates on their leads — but these updates only existed for internal use and weren't visible anywhere in the app. My idea was to turn these required updates into a running timeline of key events and notes for each lead.
The thinking: if agents could see their own updates compiled into something useful, they'd be more compelled to maintain the record — and it would give them a quick, lightweight reference for each lead's history.
Trade-off: simple and low-effort, but only captures general milestones rather than detailed notes.
Proposal 2: Call Notes Prompt
Most agent-lead interactions happen over the phone. My second idea was to prompt agents to record notes immediately after a call — targeting the exact moment they'd be most likely to want to jot something down.
Trade-off: captures more detail, but risks introducing a new workflow that competes with agents' existing CRM habits.
Testing
After testing both concepts with agents, I learned that:
The lead timeline concept was helpful
It gave visibility to previously invisible updates without disrupting their workflow. Agents felt more compelled to keep it up to date now that it was useful to them too.
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.
Final designs and results
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