EXHIBIT · MUSTWANTS

MustWants — case exhibit

MustWants

Founding product design for an AI home-buying platform where buyers simulate lifestyle fit — hosting, morning routine, daily life — before booking a tour. I owned research through UI in Figma and rapid prototypes in Cursor.

Role
Lead Product Designer · Research, UX/UI, frontend collaboration
Year
2024–2025
Duration
1.5 years
Tools
Figma · Cursor · Lovable · Miro · Jira

BRAND SPECIMEN

01

THE PROBLEM

Listings sell square footage, not a life.

Buyers spend weeks touring homes that photograph well and live wrong. The hard part was never the search volume — it's that nothing in a listing answers the questions that actually decide a home: can I host here, where does my morning start, where does ordinary daily life happen. People book tours on incomplete signals, and agents burn hours on poor-fit walkthroughs.

7 homesthe median a buyer tours before purchasing — and finding the right one is the single hardest part of the processNAR Profile of Home Buyers & Sellers, 2024
  • HostingWhere do friends and family actually land?
  • Morning routineLight, coffee, the first hour of the day
  • Daily lifeWhere work, meals, and downtime really happen
  • The commuteWhat the listing photos never show

Founding product design · research through UI

02

THE MECHANISM

A home is a compatibility match, not a spec sheet.

Search tools optimize for the things that are easy to filter — price, beds, square footage — and ignore the things buyers actually choose on. The model that fit wasn't a better search; it was the one dating apps already proved: stop ranking listings, and start testing fit before anyone commits. The platform's job is to simulate the life a buyer would lead in a space, not catalog its dimensions.

  • What listings optimize

    • Price and beds
    • Square footage
    • Finishes and photos

  • What buyers decide on

    • Can I host here
    • Does my routine fit
    • Is daily life better

  • The gap

    • Tours fill the blanks
    • Slow, costly, late
    • Fit discovered at the door

Model: compatibility before commitment · dating-app analogy

03

THE INSIGHT

Simulate the life, not the floor plan.

If buyers choose homes the way they choose partners — on lifestyle compatibility — then the product should let them test-drive a lifestyle before spending a tour. Persona-driven simulations move the moment of fit earlier: a buyer feels whether a space works for hosting, mornings, and daily life from their phone, and only the matches earn a walkthrough. The tour stops being how you discover fit and becomes how you confirm it.

  1. Browsing listingsFiltering specs, guessing at fit
  2. Simulating fitTest-driving hosting, mornings, daily life
  3. Touring with intentWalking only the homes that already fit
  4. Choosing confidentlyA decision grounded in lived experience

Persona-driven mobile flows · iterative testing

04

THE DESIGN RESPONSE

Dating-style simulations, founded in Figma and Cursor.

This is where my work lived. As founding designer I owned research through UI: the persona model, the mobile flows, and the dating-style simulations for hosting, morning routine, and daily life. I prototyped rapidly in Cursor so we could feel the interactions in a browser instead of arguing over static frames — closing the gap between the Figma design and a thing buyers could actually swipe through.

  • Test-drive the life before you tour the house.

Figma · Cursor · Lovable · founding 0→1

05

THE OUTCOME

Fit before the front door.

The persona-driven flows simplified property browsing and raised engagement across iterative testing — buyers spent their attention on compatibility instead of scrolling specs. As a founding-stage product the result is directional, not a launch metric, but it pointed the same way every round: when the simulation came first, the tour list got shorter and more certain.

  • Proven

    • Compatibility framing beats spec-first search in testing
    • Persona simulations raise engagement

  • Next

    • Widen the simulation set beyond hosting and routine
    • Tune persona matching against real tour outcomes
    • Bring agents into the loop on confirmed-fit tours

  • Measure

    • Tours-to-offer ratio, not just listings viewed
    • Engagement with simulations vs. specs
    • Buyer-reported confidence before touring

Outcome and design direction · MustWants

  1. COMPATIBILITY PLATFORM

    Dating-style simulations let buyers test hosting, morning routine, and daily life in a space before scheduling agent tours.

    Persona-driven mobile flows simplified property browsing and raised engagement in iterative testing.

    View presentation →
Paul Banks[ ID: BANKS_P ]

CHARLOTTE_NC //

Paul Banks

Architect of Intent

Designing for humans, engineering for agents. After 19 years extracting human patterns, I've pivoted from crafting static interfaces to architecting autonomous systems — building the logic that helps agents understand what people actually need.

> INITIATE_DOWNLOAD: PAUL_BANKS_RESUME.PDF> SEE: BRAND_VOICE_WORK