Matterport Genesis: a new way to design properties
I started at Matterport as the 3D Experiences lead, designing immersive tooling & experiences for our vast catalogue of digital twins. I quickly became the lead for our AI and Promote pillar programs as well. I also managed 4+ designers and guided related initiatives.
In my work, I discovered emergent user needs across our user segments & unserved markets - home shoppers & dwellers - and continued learning & pushing. This case study details the vision I created and pitched to leadership, the plan and strategy I proposed to make it reality, and the first product deliverable I designed & released with our incredibly talented teams of cross-functional partners & collaborators.
Background
Matterport: Digital Twin Creation, from Hardware Design to Sparking Imagination
Matterport is the leading way to create 3D digital twins. Their platform uses specialized cameras and software to capture and model real-world environments, allowing users to explore and interact with these spaces virtually. It's commonly used in real estate, architecture, and facility management. We have millions of spaces in our catalogue, filled with data and possibilities.
Matterport designs and manufactures 3D cameras, affords tools to easily create virtual tours and annotations of the digital twin, and for many users, that's where their Matterport journey ends. My core goal at Matterport is to pull us in to the entire property lifecycle, serving the needs and pains of the users at each phase - understand what we've been, and what got us here, but also to push us forward into the future of what could be.
Why couldn't my digital twin be used as a source of truth for my insurance company, or for government entities? Why can't I connect all my smart home devices & monitor my home from within my digital twin when I'm away? Why shouldn't I redesign my house for better flow and style, and have a handy-dandy "buy now" button when I'm ready to commit?
First, the Vision & Strategy
Pitching the concept & setting the course
I'd been tossing these concepts around in unfinished forms for a while - and as I came to a close on a prior project, I proposed to our Chief Design Officer that I'd like 1 month of dedicated time to incubate an idea. He was not only supportive, but also rallied excitement from leadership, and they offered other folks to join in on the skunkworks.
✦ The team:
Myself as the core creator & driving force, as well as cross-functional partners ready to jump in however needed. I worked intermittently with our founder & Chief Scientist, product management director, as well as another designer, motion designer, and user researcher. Our key stakeholders, whom I synced with weekly (and in the last week, daily), consisted of our CTO, CDO, VP of PM, and CEO.
✦ Week 1: Discovery
Our first week was intensely focused on learning everything we could, creating personas and journeys, competitive analyses, product audits, iterating in many directions, and testing early concepts.
✦ Week 2: Design
With a few directions solidifying, we spent the next week outlining design & product principles, product goals, brand & visual identity, mobile and web form-factors, and creating user flows & prototypes to test and refine further.
✦ Week 3: Testing
Though we already had weekly leadership review & feedback sessions, we also had leadership act as users to test our prototypes. We also recruited 35+ users (within our persona groups identified earlier) to test. We sent surveys to 100+ current and potential future users.
What we learned: We were not only on the right track, but people wanted this and more, now. And were willing to pay for it.
✦ Week 4: Pitch
With solid footing, we condensed down to several scenarios and started storyboarding our vision videos. I recruited the help of our motion designer for more refined animations. We put our pitch for this new initiative together - outlining our why, what, strategy, plan of attack, and proposed now/next/future - and pitched it to our board of investors. We were met with incredible support. This initiative is now 80%+ of our next 3 year roadmap, and has lead directly to our acquisition in 2024.
✴︎ Here're the videos we created for our pitch (UI is conceptual, not totally polished!)
🏢 Office/Commercial Scenario
🥳 Live Multiplayer Collaboration
🪑 Add anything, anywhere
✴︎ Ideation Graveyard Example: Mobile+AI Interior Design
Next, the full process for first product
Discovering, defining, designing, and delivering
First, I facilitated a session to review the proposed plan of attack with a fine-toothed comb with cross-functional leadership. With the blessing from the top to make this reality, myself, product management, and engineering leaders further refined the initial plan, taking in to account more wiggle room, resources for other projects and maintenance, and injecting other new information.
We put together a quadriga to lead the initiative and steer other teams under the umbrella - consisting of myself, the product management leader I'd worked with on the pitch, and two engineering managers (one for productization and one for technical research).
✦ Goals & challenges:
🏡 Disrupt the interior design, construction, and facilities management industries (+ many more applications).
🙋♀️ Tap a new market/user base that we've previously ignored, with potentially millions of new users.
⏳ Alleviate a huge pain point and time sink for current users, to the tune of ~$15 a space. Users scan about ~180k spaces monthly.
🏆 Industry-wide recognition, acknowledgement, and thought leadership.
✦ The teams:
I worked with our webGL, mobile, computer vision, and platform teams, partnering closely with our product management, engineering, and quality assurance leads throughout product creation. I also regularly met with other critical collaborators and stakeholders, including marketing, monetization, user research, design, sales, customer service, business development, and leadership.
✦ My role:
Team lead, product designer, at times product manager. Orchestrator and connector of multiple teams, partners, and stakeholders to keep all gears turning and maintaining a holistic feel. I've been responsible for the initial vision, strategy, and business pitch, as well as ongoing definition, research, testing, scoping, presentations and reviews, customer education and marketing materials, and all the in-the-weeds design work along the way. I also lead a design team of 3.
✦ The projects:
In my initial pitch, I proposed multiple separate projects that would weave together to build out our transformative experience. For first product, we prioritized the start of "Auto-designer", "Auto-descriptions", "Auto-tours", and other groundwork, platform-level improvements to support these projects' success. The rest of this case study details the first product for "Auto-designer".
✦ The milestones:
3 months | Understand what's technically feasible, define the scope of first product based on learnings.
6 months | First demo (mix of build and design, preview for feedback)
9 months | Second demo (mostly build, everyone can kick the tires)
12 months | Beta test of first product!
24 months | Beta test of 2.0
Opportunity
Scan → Empty → Design
There was nothing easy to use on the market - nothing that could remove furniture from a digital space beyond manual human work. To add furniture to an empty space, photographers and agents had to learn how to use complicated virtual staging applications or complicated 3D rendering tools like Blender. 3D furniture objects had to be manually sized, placed, and styled. Photographers felt this pain the most of any persona, especially when they need to turn around a residential property in less than 36 hours.
Some realtors empty a property before calling a photographer to scan it - but that takes time and resources, and not all sellers are able to put their belongings in storage so quickly. It also means all staging in imagery will be virtual, which, back to the pain points above.
✦ Trend Mapping
✦ Assumption Mapping
Research
Interviews, surveys, A/B testing, analytics, contextual inquiries, ride-alongs, and more
I prefer to take a multimodal approach to research - many perspectives and methods = lots of insights to analyze, prioritize, share out, and action on.
✦ Persona & User-Journey Focus Workshop
✦ Market Needs Survey
✦ Early Interview Insights & Concept Feedback
"PLEASE make this. Seriously. I have done so many house projects and this would be a game changer to have. I would be your first buyer."
-Home owner
"Wait so not only could I use real furniture in my 3D space, but an AI interior designer could help me put it all together? That would be so helpful."
-Home owner
"Virtual staging can b kind of pricey and difficult to get right. This makes it look so easy. I'd stage all my properties if I had this. Especially if I could save templates."
-Agent
"It would be so cool to decorate my dorm room with my roommates before we move in!"
-Undergraduate student
"We could do a scan before, proposals with versions of that, then a scan after… That could be really helpful for inspections and on our portfolio too."
-Contractor
"This would be a great fast way to mock up options for clients. Our professional software takes time… If we had an accurate scan to start with, wow."
-Interior Designer
Iteration
Collaboration is key 🫂
When I ideate, I love to take a minute and outline early ideas, then bring engineers, product managers, designers, and other cross-functional partners in to the brainstorm for even more thoughts and perspectives. Cataloguing and analyzing common themes from sessions helps bring clarity to what we'll explore next.
✦ Defurnish Explorations and Feasibility Workshops
(Yes, I know you're judging my frame names.)
I prefer to regularly review workflows with engineering and quality assurance to do feasibility checks - and get tech research started early.
✦ Scoping Workshops
Once we have 2-3 distinct scope options designed and tested, I like to work with product management and engineering to assess which direction we want to continue with, any changes to be made, and detail every screen and feature with notes.
Build
We 🩶 JIRA and 🐶 dogfood
Rethinking customer service, retail, sales, and interior design with depth-enabled, AI-enhanced, live shared video.
✦ After converging design directions and locking scope, we put together a requirements document and ranked features into phases.
✦ Keeping track of alllllll the things across teams in our fave MVP JIRA.
✦ Site-mapping, annotating, and red-lining as needed.
✦ User research & testing throughout design and build, and during internal Alpha.
Results
Learning in Alpha, Beta, and Beyond 🚀
I like to give breathing room between Alpha, Beta, and GA to give us time to analyze and respond to incoming feedback and learnings. I typically work with PM & ENG (and QA, UXR, and more stakeholders on a less often schedule) to regularly check in and discuss and prioritize findings, triage bugs, and add things to our backlog.
For Beta and GA especially, I push for continuing user research (interviews, contextual inquiries, etc.), data analytics, and using a version of Google's HEART framework I've customized to ground us.
✦ Check back soon! We're collecting Beta feedback currently. (Outcomes so far are outstanding!)
✦ What we're tracking
Happiness
A measure of users' attitudes or satisfaction.
Task Success
Can users get through all core tasks?
Revenue & NDR
Measuring ROI from the feature.
Adoption
The percent of users that adopt the full core flow of a specific feature.
Engagement
The level of use an average customer is getting from your product.
Retention
The rate of total users that are returning to your product.
✦ User feedback so far
"You're doing in 3D what people can't even get right in 2D right now…"
-Redfin
"Omg this is going to save me SO MUCH TIME. And people don't have to clean before a scan. When can I get this?"
-Photographer
"Wow, this actually looks really good. I would like to show this instead of the original scans."
-Agent
"I'm ready to start offering this to clients right now… If I sign up to evangelize, can I get this early to keep trying it out?"
-Photographer/Agent
"Will there be an option to bulk process all of our old spaces from before this was available? This will be huge for showing our apartments."
-Property Manager
"I'd love this for my own house… Maybe I can show my kids how much better their rooms would look if they were clean!"
-Home shopper
Reflection
Retrospective & Prospective
I highly encourage regular retros in order to address issues early and often & keep teams working well together. However, after a project release is a great time to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and come together as a team to discuss what you'd like to do differently next time and what you'd like to continue doing. It's also a time for recognizing one another and celebrating all the hard work the team has done for a successful launch.
✦ This work has been touted as an exemplar for everyone at the company to emulate — strategic, thoughtful, transparent, user-focused, structured, with impressive results.
✦ We'll continue the end-to-end work on what's next - and building out the Genesis vision.
✦ We'll be gathering and integrating feedback as fast-follows and future versions.
✦ So far, we've reflected on the need for more official team kickoffs, more focus-time for our individual contributors, and more regular rounds of user testing. Improvements to plan into our schedules on the next loop.
← Home
Nicole Guernsey
Innovation, Design, Strategy