Background
Doma helps people buy homes by handling the paperwork and legal details needed to officially transfer ownership, including title insurance and escrow services.
problem
Doma’s Escrow Officers were overwhelmed by their workloads while their clients, Real Estate Agents, felt in the dark about the status of their orders.
Enter Doma Close
An online portal where real estate agents and their clients (home sellers and buyers) can request, track, and manage their transactions with Doma.
My team focused on the Real Estate Agent experience for the Doma Close portal. These were four essential features to the realtor portal:
I worked on all of these features, but in this case study I’m going to focus on just one: the Request New Order Form.
I led the design of this form and collaborated closely with engineers and PMs from ideation through launch.
Final Designs
Discovery
Our team moved quickly into research mode to understand the landscape of the problem, our users, and potential solutions.
User Interviews with Doma’s Real Estate Agent clients
Stakeholder Interviews with Doma’s business leaders and Escrow Officers
Market Research & Analog Analysis
Existing Process & Document Review
Current State of the Order Request Process
3-5 emails are exchanged between Realtors and Escrow Officers to open just one new title order.
Before Doma Close, Real Estate Agents had to email a Doma Escrow Officer to request a new title order. They would have to provide the details of their order through a series of exchanges with the EO, including the Property Address, Seller Information, Buyer Information, Signed Purchase Agreement, and more.
The process was slow, inefficient and took way more back and forth than it needed to. That's where our work came in.
Even though this process involves a lot of back and forth, long-established habits among REAs, especially those who had been in the industry for a long time, made them resistant to adopting new workflows unless the benefits were immediate and tangible.
—> The form must outperform email in terms of convenience and speed.
Our Design Principles & Objectives
How might we create a form that feels easier for our REA partners to use than emailing their EOs?
Simplicity: Minimize perceived complexity so the form feels manageable at first glance.
--> Keep the form as short as possible while meeting business and legal requirements.
--> Clearly indicate which sections are optional to reduce unnecessary input.
Focus: Guide users through the form without overwhelming them.
--> Use visual anchors, clear progress indicators, and collapsed optional fields to reduce cognitive load
--> Encourage users to verify pre-filled information before submitting.
Flexibility: Ensure the form can adapt to different needs and future improvements.
--> Design the Order Request form to accommodate different fields for two order types.
--> Consider future use cases, allowing for evolving workflows—such as automating document parsing as capabilities expand.
Transparency: Provide clarity on the form’s length and requirements up front
--> Reveal the full length of the form as early in the experience to set expectations.
Wizard vs Stepper Layout
We conducted user testing with Real Estate Agents to determine which form layout—Wizard or Stepper—would provide the best experience for completing orders effectively.
Wizard Layout: A Focused, Step-by-Step Approach
Hypothesis: I believed that a wizard-style form would be preferred because it keeps users focused on one step at a time, reducing cognitive load and making the process feel guided.
However, while the wizard kept the interface minimal, it also hid the full scope of the form. Users expressed concerns about transparency—they wanted to see the entire process upfront rather than feeling like they were progressing blindly.
Stepper Layout: Transparency Over Focus
Reality: Through testing, we discovered that transparency was more critical than focus. Real estate agents wanted visibility into the form's full length and structure before beginning, even if it meant handling more information at once. This insight was surprising, as we initially assumed a step-by-step approach would ease navigation.
We opted for the stepper layout, ensuring that users could see the entire process upfront while still maintaining clarity within each section.
User Needs: Agents prioritized clarity and transparency over a guided experience.
Business Considerations: The stepper format aligned better with the overall product experience, where users would encounter similar workflows in other parts of the platform.
Scalability: The stepper approach provided a more flexible structure that could be adapted for future use cases.
Long Form Optimization
From my research I’d learned that in order to help users stay focused in a long-form experience, we needed:
Our Design System
I contributed to and followed the guidelines our new design system, Bungalow.
To ensure consistency and reduce redundancy across teams working on Doma Close, we committed to building Bungalow, a new design system. I collaborated with our Design Systems Lead (and often other designers) to define components and experiences that would be effective across all portal users and use cases.
This work covered everything from form structures to button styles, pop-up modals, and file drop zones, creating a unified experience that streamlined workflows and improved usability.
Product and Feature Roadmap
MVP
Stepper Components
Key Features and States
V1
Bungalow Design System
Edge Cases
V2
Purchase Agreement Parsing
*Note on the User Flow
In some states, the Order Request form would need to accommodate two different types of orders. As Doma’s tech capabilities evolved, so did this flow.
MVP
In this first iteration of the user flow, users were given the option to select the type of order they would like to open in the first step.
Room for Error: Too much trust being put in users to know whether or not they are in a presale state. Agents in a state that does not allow presale orders might select this option accidentally.
Delayed Feedback: There is no checkpoint until the last step when the user realizes they don’t have a purchase agreement to upload (if they did, it would be time to open a title order).
We launched the MVP version of the app to a pilot group of 60 Real Estate Agents. We used the old Doma visual style while building on new design system in the background.
Pilot Learnings
Seeing a disabled Presale Order option was confusing to agents
Other people on a realtor's team, like transaction coordinators, need access to a real estate agent’s orders with Doma
New agents were more open to changing their workflow than old ones were
V1
In the next iteration of the user flow, we started by asking for the property location first to automatically determine if a presale was an option in that state. If eligible, users could select a presale order type. Otherwise, they could only proceed with a title & closing order
Auto-Fill: Integrated with the US Postal Service’s address database to provide real-time suggestions as users type, reducing manual input and errors.
Early Verification: Automatically determines presale eligibility based on the property address, ensuring users see only the options relevant to them.
New Design System: All designs were updated with Bungalow Design System components for the V1 launch, creating a more modern, cohesive, and user-friendly experience.
V2
Document Parsing was a new capability that allowed us to pull all of the information needed to open a title & escrow order directly from the Purchase Agreement.
In this iteration of the user flow, we begin by asking the user to upload the purchase agreement. If they didn't have one, they could open a presale order instead.
