Proptech web appLead Frontend Developer · 2022
Little Hinges - Inspect Now
A guided assistant that sits on top of 3D virtual property tours and turns a passive walkthrough into an offer, an enquiry or an auction registration. I led the front end and was the only developer on it, taking the React app buyers used from kickoff to limited release in about eleven weeks.
- Role
- Lead Frontend Developer
- Partner
- Little Hinges
- Year
- 2022
- Status
- No longer live
- Stack
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- AWS Amplify
The brief
Turn a virtual walkthrough into a conversation with the buyer
Little Hinges produces 3D virtual tours, photography and floorplans for Australian real estate agents. A tour lets buyers inspect a home without attending an open home, but on its own it's passive: people look around, leave, and the agent learns nothing about who was serious. Inspect Now was built to catch that intent while the buyer is still inside the tour and pass it straight to the listing agent.
I owned the front end: a React and TypeScript single page app that wraps the embedded tour with menus and an animated assistant. At timed moments the assistant offers short conversational flows (make an indicative offer, send an enquiry, register to bid at auction, or play a guess the price game), letting buyers sign in with a social or email account along the way. Every step was tracked with a shared naming scheme, so the offer, enquiry and auction funnels read the same way in each analytics tool.
The key design choice was letting the server drive the conversation. The API decides the next step, and the front end is a generic renderer that turns each step template into a single or multistep flow, which kept new journeys largely a back end change. A mock back end that mirrored the real API meant front end work never had to wait for endpoints to exist.
Outcome
- ~11 wksFrom kickoff to limited release
- 4Buyer journeys tracked end to end
- 2Developers on the build, me on the front end and one on the back, with a UX designer