onboarding ux
product design
workshops
8 days to onboard a client.
We asked: what if it took none?
Reduced onboarding from 8 days to 1 by redesigning the end-to-end onboarding experience for new real estate agencies on Property Finder — UAE's leading property portal.
Timeline
Oct 2025 - Mar 2026
Industry
Real Estate
Segment
New Real Estate Agencies
my role
Sr. Product Designer
When a platform scales faster than processes
As the Emerald segment grew across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and the Northern Emirates, so did the burden. CSPs were each managing around 200 accounts. Manual onboarding was taking up to 8 days per client. And the clients who slipped through the cracks published bad listings, burned credits, failed permit validation, and churned.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How might we create digital-first, self-serve onboarding experience in PF Expert, designed to guide new clients through operational setup and learning, while reducing dependency on human-led onboarding?
Team & Timeline
product manager
Sabine darkoub
ux designer
Olena Horbachenko
Head of Design
Nina Najla Zahr
Service Designer
Hiba Rageh
Engineering Manager
Sergey Skutin
Backend
Taranveer Singh
User Researcher
Zarah Shaheen
Frontend
Ilyas Assainov
Business Analyst
Jatin Dhiman
Discovery & Stakeholder Research
Internal interviews with CSPs, Business Consultants, and new business teams. First pain point mapping.
User Research & Co-creation Workshop
8+ sessions with recently onboarded Emerald agencies. In-person workshop (Nov 6) with 20+ cross-functional stakeholders.
Ideation, Prioritisation & Low-Fidelity Flows
Impact vs. effort scoring, How Might We statements, prototyping key flows.
Design Validation Walkthroughs
Internal journey walkthrough sessions with BCs and CSPs. Iteration based on critical feedback.
Target Launch — PF Expert Onboarding 2.0
Digital-first, self-serve onboarding goes live across all UAE regions.
Impact
Users rush to listing publishing
New real estate agencies had everything they needed to get started — PF Academy, in-person trainings, legal setup guides. It felt either too overwhelming or too abstract to bother with. So clients would skip it. Then they'd try to publish their first listing, hit a government permit requirement they'd never heard of, and call their CSP. If information doesn't show up at the right moment, in the right order, people won't act on it. Not because they don't care — but because they're busy trying to run a business.
Preventing internal back-and-forth with one alignment session
We ran 8+ sessions with recently onboarded Emerald agencies — fresh enough to remember the friction, settled enough to have hit it. Alongside that, deep-dive interviews with CSPs and Business Consultants surfaced the same insight independently: the Trakheesi permit was the single biggest blocker. The data from the research was used as an input for workshop for 20+ people: PMs, researchers, Designers, Business Consultants, CSPs, and Inside Sales.
Imagine gathering 20+ professional to brainstorm
PF Expert Onboarding 2.0 opens on a persistent Getting Started dashboard. It appears on first login and stays the default landing page until everything is done. It's split in two: Operational Setup (what you must do to go live) and Learning & Product Tours (what makes you successful long-term).
Every step sends the user to the real page in PF Expert in a new tab, followed by a contextual WalkMe tour. Nothing is explained in isolation — everything is tied to a real action in the real product.
Our first attempt didn't work because we tried to teach clients everything at once
In January's validation sessions, a tension crystallised. Internal teams wanted mandatory, locked-step training. The research showed forced completion just created negative sentiment and higher abandonment.
We resolved it by separating hard prerequisites from soft guidance. If a client doesn't have their Trakheesi/BRN, they literally cannot list — so those trigger mandatory academy courses. Everything else is contextual, embedded, and optional.
WalkMe tours replaced formal training for most operational tasks. Short 30–60 second in-product videos replaced the academy for things like watermarks, credit cycles, listing creation, and profile setup. The academy became a place for advanced learning — not a gate.
On the tooltips. The in-product tooltips along the listing flow I built in WalkMe. They imitate the hand-holding clients used to get from a CSP — so they don't get stuck or frustrated when they suddenly realise something's missing.
On permits specifically. In the old onboarding there was nothing digital that told a client permits even mattered. A client would create a listing, hit the Trakheesi field, ask the CSP "what is that?", get a PDF back, and try to figure it out — with the CSP chasing. So we did two things: surface permits on the Getting Started dashboard from the very first login, where clients can learn what they need and how to get it; and inside listing creation, highlight the Trakheesi field directly with exactly what to do and where.
On listing quality. To publish and get leads, a client fills a long form — property details, amenities, location. We worked with the PM to pull real benchmark data showing what a complete listing gets versus an incomplete one, in visibility and leads, so the effort connects to an outcome the client can see.
Few takeaways
Results
PF Expert Platform