Novii — Sean Valadao Duarte

Sean Valadão Duarte

Sean Valadão Duarte is a Senior Product & Experience Designer based in Lisboa, specialising in clear, scalable digital products across UX research, strategy and systemised UI. Outside of work, he can usually be found watching Arsenal on the weekends, making ambient tunes in the evenings, and practising his questionable Portuguese whenever he can.

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Exceptional ALIEN
Venues NSW
McGrath
Optimize Mind Performance
Novii
Constantinople
Sportsbet
Invocare
Finstro (Coming soon)
Redback (Coming soon)
Powershop (Coming soon)

Novii

Index

Role: Senior UX/UI DesignerIndustry: Real estate
Time: 4 weeks
Delivered: Website product strategy

Reimagining property data to help people better understand the places they live, and the ones they’re considering next.

OverviewNovii is a partner of realestate.com.au (REA), offering a paid platform that enables real estate agents to showcase their track record across sales, leasing, and property management. Through this partnership, Novii has access to rich property and suburb-level data across Australia, much of which remained underutilised in customer-facing experiences.

TaskAs a smaller partner within the REA ecosystem, Novii needed to evolve beyond a static profile service. The task was to deepen engagement with real estate agents while identifying adjacent audiences that could support future growth through new value propositions.

Business benefitCreate new revenue streams and expand Novii’s service offering across both existing and emerging audiences.

Customer benefit
Equip real estate agents with clearer, more compelling data-driven tools that support differentiation, credibility and new commercial opportunities.
Problem
Novii’s existing product felt disconnected from the wider REA ecosystem and no longer reflected the value of the data available to it. While REA continued to evolve its consumer and agent platforms, Novii risked becoming peripheral, both functionally and strategically. To remain relevant, Novii needed to redefine its role as a partner by demonstrating a clear vision for how property data could be better harnessed to create meaningful value for both B2B and B2C audiences.

Approach
Discovery & competitive Analysis

To broaden our perspective, we looked beyond traditional real estate platforms and examined products across property, culture and media that successfully translate complex data into experiences people actually engage with.

This exploration helped reframe how Novii’s existing property and suburb data could be activated in more meaningful ways, revealing opportunities to move beyond static information toward experiences that build understanding, identity and connection.

CompassCompass uses suburb profiling to give users a holistic view of what it’s like to live in a particular area. Its approach combines property data with lifestyle indicators and local context, helping users understand not just the market, but the character of a place. This demonstrated how data can support decision making by painting a richer, more human picture of location.

Spotify
Spotify’s “Wrapped” experience shows how personal and aggregated data can be transformed into something engaging, accessible, and shareable. Rather than overwhelming users with metrics, it surfaces insight through storytelling, helping people understand their tastes while creating moments of delight and connection. This highlighted the power of data when framed as narrative rather than information.
Broadsheet
Broadsheet acts as a cultural lens for cities, keeping locals and visitors informed about what’s happening and what’s emerging. By curating trends, places, and moments, it turns information into relevance. This reinforced how data, when contextualised, can help people explore and appreciate place in a more intuitive and human way.

Approach
Reframing Novii’s role

Novii’s existing experience positioned it as a passive layer within the REA ecosystem. While useful, it remained peripheral.

Despite access to rich property and suburb data, the platform did little to actively engage agents or demonstrate how this data could support credibility, insight or differentiation.

The first step was to reconsider Novii’s role entirely. Not as a profile service, but as an experience that helps people better understand place, context and expertise through data.

Approach
Developing new value propositions

Building on discovery and shared alignment around both current and emerging data opportunities, the focus shifted toward identifying new sources of value for Novii’s existing customers while opening relevance for new audiences.

This work centred on how suburb and community data could be reframed through a more cultural and hyper local lens, shaping perception rather than simply reporting metrics. The aim was to move beyond market statistics and toward experiences that help people understand the character, energy and context of place.

Customers
For Novii’s core customers, this approach offered greater visibility, stronger differentiation and new ways to generate leads through insight driven storytelling and trend awareness.

New audience
For new audiences, it introduced a more engaging and accessible way to explore their local area, transforming data into a form of discovery and entertainment while surfacing knowledge they may not otherwise encounter.

Approach
Framing the challenge

At its core, the challenge was one of translation.

How might Novii transform complex property and suburb data into experiences that feel accessible, credible and valuable, without overwhelming users or diluting trust?

This framing allowed the work to explore experience concepts that were ambitious, yet grounded in real world behaviour.

Solution
Defining a new experience direction

The outcome of this work was a new experience concept for Novii, shaped around the acquisition and interpretation of data to offer a more meaningful way for people to understand themselves through the communities they live in.

The focus was on defining how Novii could present a clearer and more coherent understanding of place, expertise and context. Rather than treating data as static information, the experience explored how property and suburb insights could connect across the journey to build clarity, credibility and trust whilst also being a new experience.

The concept demonstrated how users might discover and explore suburb level insight, how agents could be positioned through knowledge rather than self promotion and how data could be surfaced in ways that feel considered, human and approachable.

Together, this work established a clear experience direction that made Novii’s future potential tangible, while remaining flexible enough to support funding discussions, partner alignment, and future roadmap planning.

Engagement and data acquisition

Mobilise a mutually beneficial survey campaign with REA to understand how people rate where they live, including what they love about where they live.

Data as a key expereince

With data gathered through the survey campaign, the findings could be mobilised as a data moment to generate awareness and interest ahead of rollout, offering Australians bespoke insights into who they are based on where they live.

Unique suburb profiles

Launch a new platform offering indepth suburb profiling from across Australia, blending practical insights with playful, culturally rich perspectives.
Each profile would combine insight, utility and discovery through a set of connected elements:

Live partnership feeds such as Netflix or Spotify, reflecting aggregated interest and consumption trends.
Integrated property listings and agent content, embedded seamlessly within the experience.
Suburb archetypes, capturing aggregated sentiment around local vibes and behaviours.
Utility insights, offering clarity on local communication services and infrastructure.
Local guides, highlighting favourite places and everyday destinations.
Agent ownership, expressed through agent profiles and links to managed properties.

Search by subject

Rather than acting solely as a suburb discovery tool, the experience allows users to explore areas by topic, helping them find places aligned with their interests or communities like their own.

Bring yourself to an area

Allow users to take a quick quiz to match them with a suburb or area that identifies with their mood or who they are.

Testing
Concept testing: A divided path

We tested the concept with a broad audience, from young renters to experienced investors. Across groups, there was strong appetite for pragmatic, local insight, with testers recognising clear value and potential for regular engagement.

National vs community canvas
Testers felt national level insights were too broad and impersonal, often disconnected from the input they had provided. There was a clear preference for community specific insight that reflected local identity. This highlighted the need for a canvas that felt more personal, relevant and responsive at an individual level.
Early product access
Testers expected their survey responses to lead to a personalised suburb profile, creating a clear end to end journey. While early access presents a strong engagement hook, it also raised questions around competitive exposure. That said, being first to market was seen as a clear advantage in establishing ownership of the concept.
Historical and pragmatic insights
Suburb profiling resonated most with financially independent, autonomous users. During testing, lighter cultural content was often seen as lacking substance, with stronger engagement driven by historical, tangible and culturally informative insights. This reinforced the need for depth and relevance in how stories about place are told and the data that represented them.

Outcome
Challenges: Format, strategy and data balance

Testing surfaced several challenges around how the experience could be rolled out effectively, particularly in relation to platform availability, data quality and the balance between participation and insight depth.

Survey response strategy
Longer surveys tend to generate richer insight but result in lower completion rates, while shorter formats encourage broader participation.
SolutionAdopt a short form survey approach to capture incremental cultural insight, balancing depth with accessibility and sustained engagement.
Profile balance
Ensuring collected data reflects the full cultural depth of both well known and lesser known suburbs was a key consideration. The experience needed to validate local truths for residents while remaining useful to visitors.
Solution
Anchor profiles in reliable statistical data, while allowing space for unexpected, character driven insights that preserve authenticity and richness.
Data verification
While long form surveys can surface nuanced cultural insight, they do not guarantee sufficient participation at scale.
Solution
Design a focused, well structured survey that delivers reliable suburb level insight, balancing depth with brevity to encourage higher response rates.

Outcome
Final recommendation

Novii received the recommendation with enthusiasm and quickly recognised its potential as a future direction for the platform.

The concept was positioned as a compelling opportunity to re-establish Novii’s value within the REA ecosystem, and Novii were eager to present it to REA as a potential product rollout. REA, in turn, recognised the strength of the proposition and expressed excitement about the opportunities it could unlock.

Team
Head of Product - Russel Privett
Senior UX/UI Designer - Sean Valadão Duarte

Tasks
Discovery
Ideation
Strategy
Indicative UI Design
Concept testing