|COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE / PROPTECHJLL brokers serve clients across the commercial real estate lifecycle—from identifying needs to closing transactions. The process is highly relationship-driven but lacks digital tooling.
- Role
- Design Lead
- Category
- New Product Design, 0-1
- Year
- 2019
The brokerage process involves extensive back-and-forth between brokers and clients, with much of the information gathering happening through email, phone calls, and in-person meetings.
JLL saw an opportunity to build a digital product that could streamline early-stage client assessment and give brokers better tools to understand and serve their clients.
How do we digitize the broker-client needs assessment process to reduce friction and improve the quality of early-stage client interactions?
Why this mattered
Brokers spent significant time on repetitive information gathering that could be streamlined. Clients, meanwhile, wanted faster, more data-driven interactions.
Behaviors to support
Replace ad-hoc information gathering with a guided, digital-first assessment process.
Limiting factors
Brokers are relationship-driven and skeptical of tools that might interfere with their client interactions.
North star metric
how might we
Through broker interviews and client research, map the current workflow and identify the highest-friction moments.
my impact
Led strategy support, design thinking workshops, research and usability testing, and managed a small design team through the 0-to-1 product development process.
team + stakeholders
Alex Chen
Product Manager
Morgan Patel
Data Scientist
Casey Liu
Product Designer
Primary stakeholders in Product Marketing; collaborated with Design Systems, Content Design, Engineering.
how we approached the work
Research
Broker and client discovery interviews
Conducted 12 broker interviews and 8 client interviews to map the current needs assessment workflow, identifying friction points and information gaps in early-stage interactions.
Ideate
Design thinking workshops with brokers
Facilitated co-design workshops with brokers to explore solution concepts, ensuring the tool would complement rather than disrupt their relationship-driven approach.
Prototype
Interactive prototype development
Built a high-fidelity interactive prototype of the assessment flow, including guided questions, data capture, and auto-generated client profiles with talking points.
Test
Usability testing and stakeholder validation
Ran multiple rounds of usability testing with brokers in realistic scenarios, iterating on the flow based on observed friction and feedback from stakeholder reviews.
Our Audience
JLL Brokers and early-stage clients
The tool serves two distinct user groups with different needs and priorities.
- —Brokers: focused on transaction lifecycle, relationships, reducing repetitive work, and defending decisions with data
- —Clients: focused on value maximization, data-driven decisions, market awareness, and efficient negotiations
Communication is my biggest pain point. If I had that solved, I could focus on what I do best—building relationships.
a summarization of the process, effort, and output
We designed and prototyped a digital needs assessment tool that guided brokers through a structured client discovery process. The tool captured key data points, generated client profiles, and provided brokers with data-driven talking points for follow-up conversations.
The product concept was validated through multiple rounds of broker interviews, usability testing, and stakeholder reviews before moving into development.