Nestora
AI as an experience, not a feature
UX Strategist · AI Positioning · Conversational Product Design · Business Case Development
Nestora is a buildtech platform helping home buyers search, evaluate, and purchase property with confidence. The platform had a strong verification feature — Nestora Verify — that ran independent checks on properties and surfaced them as a structured report. The brief: stop thinking about AI as a feature to bolt on, and start thinking about it as an experience the buyer feels throughout their journey. That is a meaningfully different design problem.
The insight that changed everything was reframing what home buyers are actually going through. A report reassures by being thorough. A conversation reassures by being available — for the question you did not think to ask, the one you are embarrassed to ask, the one that shows up at 2am. Verify's four categories were a solid foundation, but the interface was doing the wrong job.
One of the sharper decisions in this project was whether Nestora should have one smart search bar that silently detects intent, or two visibly distinct search experiences. I chose to keep them structurally separate. A single ambiguous input would need a classifier guessing what the user meant on every query, with no reliable way for the user to predict what kind of answer they would get back. Two honest, distinct surfaces let the buyer self-select correctly.
Every response is generated live and backed by real sources — civic records, builder history, verified property data — rather than pre-written. When a buyer asks a hard question, the system answers honestly, including saying plainly when data is not available. An earlier draft answered a safety question with generic reassurance dressed up with citations that had nothing to do with the question asked. Catching and correcting that shaped a hard rule for how the AI is allowed to respond.
This work reframed Nestora's AI from a feature description into a felt, ongoing relationship with the buyer. The business case centred on a problem most proptech platforms do not solve: single-transaction economics. By extending the AI's presence past the transaction, the design opens a path to post-purchase retention and a freemium model that converts a warm, already-trusting user.