Amenti AG / Zürich, Switzerland
Duration
06.2019 - 09.2025
Team
Product Managers, Developers, Architects, Sales & Account Managers
Role
Product Designer
User research, User Flows, Rapid Prototyping, Workshop Facilitation, Interaction Design, Visual Design
Supporting Roles
Product positioning, Feature Prioritization, Lead Capture, Campaign Creations
Amenti is a proptech company based in Switzerland that significantly accelerates early-stage real estate projects while reducing risks across all areas.
The platform visualizes the interactions between building law, architecture, finance, and market data in real time—helping users understand them as parts of an integrated system rather than isolated concerns.
It’s designed to support seamless collaboration between all key stakeholders: architects, developers, real estate managers, engineers, government officials, investors, and banks. Whether researching the market, starting a new project, or reviewing existing assets, Amenti helps align their goals and surface potential risks from the outset—enabling teams to adapt project designs early, while changes are still possible and cost-effective.
In short, Amenti reduces uncertainty and lowers the risk of costly missteps early in the development lifecycle.
My approach was to create a shared space of information to align all stakeholders around a clear understanding of the project.
The design had to be inclusive and intuitive, accommodating users with or without an architectural background.
What was the problem?
The traditional feasibility study process is slow, costly, and typically limited to a single version. Because each iteration requires significant time from architects, these traditional methods leave little room for exploration or adjustment. Our goal was to design a streamlined product that enables fast, independent study creation—reducing time and cost while improving quality.
Limited early collaboration between stakeholders often leads to misaligned decisions and unrealistic expectations—making changes harder and more expensive later in the project.
Swiss building law is highly complex, spanning regulations across federal, cantonal, and municipal levels. Much of it remains non-digital, making the rules difficult to access, interpret, and apply in practice.
As one of the least digitized sectors, real estate is resistant to change—making it challenging to introduce new tools and shift long-standing workflows.
What did we solve?
With Amenti’s web platform we were able to:
Significant reductions in time and costs
Unified the fragment process for our users
Brought together all the key aspects involved in creating a feasibility study and made them accessible and given equal importance to all stakeholders from the very beginning.
Building Law
Form
Usage
Parking
Created the largest building law database
To ensure legal compliance at all steps, we began by digitizing Swiss building law—an effort that allowed us to standardize diverse legal inputs and consistently evaluate all generated projects against them.
Constant value increase as source of growth
By continuously refining our product’s user experience and features, we surpassed our competitors in usability and user satisfaction. Much of our growth over time was driven by referrals from satisfied clients who embraced the new ways of working.
Discovering and Defining the Vision
As the founders brought deep, hands-on experience from various areas of real estate, their insights naturally shaped the initial idea behind Amenti. By the time I joined as the fifth team member and first designer, a rough coded prototype was already in place to test the core functionality. To ground the concept, I began by interviewing them—uncovering both their professional expertise and personal vision for the product, along with the constraints we needed to navigate in.
Amenti’s first prototype was created in 2018, before I became part of the team.
Next I began by researching the needs, pain points, and habits of potential users through over 30 interviews across Switzerland, Estonia, and Germany, followed by surveys targeting these same participants for additional insights. These sessions helped validate some assumptions behind the founders' initial prototype while challenging others. This research laid the groundwork for journey maps, personas, and feature prioritization.
Results & Findings
Our research showed that Switzerland is the ideal starting point—its complex regulations and competitive land market were the perfect fit for our tool to drive change and add value.
Amenti's Initial Prototype: Experience Review Insights
Prioritizing User Needs & Defining Design Goals
Following initial user and prototype research, I mapped a wide range of jobs across personas—including both direct customers and their clients as part of the extended user group.
Example of a Job-To-Be-Done for creating a Feasibility Study for an developer
Actor
Situation
As an solo architect
When I’m looking for new clients
Using insights from our Jobs-To-Be-Done exercises, we identified recurring patterns and organized user needs into six key stages of the journey. This structure helped us map overlapping pain points in daily tasks and revealed where the prototype fell short—guiding the development of targeted MVP concepts for each stage.
Consolidating the User Journey
Identify potential location and assess key preliminary data.
Review building regulations and apply constraints to shape design.
Explore early design ideas and assess rough financial viability.
Align with stakeholders and validate initial findings.
Update concepts based on input from stakeholders and colleagues.
Proceed with applying for a loan from bank or planning to obtain the building permit.
Feature Strategy & MVP Planning
We knew our feature list would keep growing, driven by both the complexities of real estate planning and ongoing user feedback. Since information overload was a key issue in the first prototype, we focused the MVP on fewer—but essential—features. The user flow was designed to support gradual expansion as user needs evolve.
Feature Priority Matrix: Key features we envisioned for the feasibility platform—and the technical bottlenecks we faced at the time.
Wireframe illustrating part of the user flow
After completing the low-fidelity prototype, we re-engaged participants from the initial research phase to conduct moderated usability tests and observe how they interacted with the new prototype app.
The no-code prototype experience was received much more positively, giving us confidence to rebuild the initial version and adopt a more iterative design process—enabling continuous refinement, gradual rollout of new features, and collecting valuable qualitative or quantitative feedback with each cycle.
Site Exploration
The filter and map overlay features help users scout plots with specific attributes, while visually revealing key environmental and regulatory factors affecting each site.
Project Setup & Regulations
Every project in Amenti starts with a review of selected locations characteristics and building regulations, supported by transparent data quality. Key legal parameters are automatically transferred across steps, forming a foundation for all decisions.
Shaping The Form
In Amenti, the Design step where the magic happens. It begins with the first topic, Form, where building volumes are automatically generated based on legal parameters. Users can then refine these forms freely in 2D or 3D, giving users the flexibility to explore design possibilities while remaining within regulatory boundaries.
From Space to Purpose
The second topic is nearly as important as the first: defining who will use the building and for what purpose. To manage this, users can quickly experiment with different usage mixes — residential, commercial, or combined — and refine them down to the smallest detail. Sub-uses and special configurations like maisonettes can be assigned per unit, offering full flexibility in how the building is planned.
Extended Functionality
Following the core features, these six stand out as key enhancements—among many others—shaped by what users valued most and designed to extend the core experience.
Final Thoughts
Designing and growing Amenti has been one of my most meaningful challenges. Over six years, the platform supported hundreds of real estate projects—many now built—and earned recognition through awards and inclusion in university programs across Switzerland.
Alongside product design, I stepped into growth and market expansion initiatives during the later years—building sales funnels, automating campaigns, and developing content strategies.
Balancing architect workflows and investor expectations required designing for very different mindsets—while maintaining a coherent, user‑centered experience. It sharpened my ability to prioritize, make trade‑offs, and align design with business value.
This journey deepened my understanding of stakeholder complexity and the systems UX operates within. Ultimately, knowing that my work has enabled better‑planned, more sustainable buildings across Switzerland—and will continue to do so—makes it all the more rewarding.