Navigating the evolving UX field with Ben Hollinsworth

The UK residential property market may be huge - it was worth about £280 billion last year with over a million properties sold. But anyone who’s ever tried to buy or sell a house in the UK can attest to how slow, painful and fraught with problems the process can be. More than 35% of property sales in England and Wales last year (2023) fell though, according to data from property investment firm Quick Move Now. 

Ben Hollinsworth heads up product design at market-leading estate agent software provider Alto, part of Houseful. the UK’s leading software, data and insight business in residential property.

It’s his team’s job to design the interface that makes buying and selling homes easier and less painful for the agents who manage the process. Alto is the market-leading software for estate agents, taking in sales and lettings management and client accounting. It’s a leading product that is used by more UK estate agents for residential sales and property management than any other CRM product. 

But it’s over 10 years old, and as such, the sheer volume of functionality creates a high learning curve for users. In his role, Ben has mastered the art of balancing pleasing both new and longtime users, along with handling new feature requests and maintenance of a complicated platform.

Ben’s background is in user experience - designing product experiences for the likes of FarFetch, Skype and Burberry. He joined Alto about three years ago, and leads its team of six product designers and one user researcher. The product designers are embedded in product teams that consist of a product manager and several engineers. The user research lead spans the whole problem space, says Ben, doing “strategically significant hands-on work” and consulting on most research activities. Company-wide, Alto has eight product managers and 50 engineers. 

Ben likens his job to fixing the plane while still keeping it flying, meaning that there is a lot of older technology that needs either to be maintained or retired, all while requests for new features are coming in.

If you do this, he says, it reduces the need for users to be trained on the product, can undermine further functionality you add, and it becomes very expensive to go back and start again. “It’s the greatest argument for why you need to be long-sighted and invest in the user experience,” he says, “not just think about what a product will do first, but how it will work when it has all the bells and whistles. Does that change the way you design or build it?”

Striking a balancing act in maintaining older technology while also embracing new ones extends to AI adoption. Like others, the company has a customer support chatbot, but any work to incorporate AI into the product itself is in early stages of development. They’re alpha testing an automatically-generated property description for property listings, powered by ChatGPT 3.5. It uses basic information that estate agents have inputted about a property, like the number of bedrooms, whether it’s chain free and so on, to take a quick first stab at a compelling description. Says Ben: “We're in the early stages of finding out how that's landing with users. I wouldn't say we're looking to hang some core functionality on AI, like many businesses are. But that's not to say we wouldn't at some point. We don't feel we need AI to differentiate ourselves, more that it’s a bonus.”

Ben says that Alto’s users are usually super users, who use the platform all day and everyday, and have large amounts of information to deal with. He sees AI being used to help them cut through the noise by using natural language searches to generate insights and removing the need for a complex user interface, for example. He says: “We're always looking for opportunities to innovate, but we're not at the point where AI is a fundamental part of our strategy – it's more opportunistic.

Naturally enough Ben sees the user experience changing and becoming more intuitive and accessible as AI becomes incorporated into products. He thinks AI will change the way we think about and leverage the user interface, steering away from what would typically be an interface with filters and columns and so on. He says: “But mostly I see it as massively enhancing - making sense of a dataset so much faster for example.”

Alto’s parent company, Houseful, occupies a dominant place in the UK property market — its other brands include property websites Zoopla and PrimeLocation, online mortgage broker Mojo, and automated valuations provider Hometrack. All of which means Alto is uniquely placed to understand and appreciate the complexity of residential housing sales transactions. 

But AI is already changing the way that the teams work at Alto. For example, engineers are now more involved in the design process than they used to be. Now when there’s evidence of an unmet need or user problem, engineers have the opportunity to look for or volunteer a technical solution, AI or otherwise.

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