Property Base Supertheme
Solving Brokerages Business Problems By Increasing The Lead Generation In The Sales Pipeline By Focusing On The Experience Of The Prospective Customer.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
Anthony Adamski, Project Lead
Seb Zapisek, Creative Director
+3%
More Inquiries On Properties
The Problem
PropertyBase needed a new product to sell to real estate brokerages to compete with Trulia and Zillow. To do this, brokerages needed an increase in Property Inquiries (Conversions) resulting in increased lead generation. I was assigned to create and lead the user experience part of the new offering.
Product
Marketing
Engineering
User Personas
The goals of this project were motivated by business needs. As such I decided to create a more complex model for the users that accounts for target customers and the users of said product.
Brokerage:
Product Buyers
Comprised of Brokers and Agents
Commonly have little style sense
More focused on client relations and constantly updating properties
Prospective Buyers:
Product Users
Comprised of Renters, Families, or Investors
Often would like to window shop, bookmark properties
Serious buyers will work exclusively with an Agent they like
Pain Points
The previous system displayed properties in a list format only, users had lack of geographical awareness
No simplified pathways back to previously seen or liked properties
Property details lacked enough indexing to other pages to improve SEO
Architecture
This flow architecture is a system of my own making, based on some elements of tactics from Altitude Inc (Now owned by Accenture). It utilizes a list of every task necessary to a user and then iteratively adjusting their placement to create groups signifying pages and sections.
Strategy
To account for varied user needs, I prioritized these two pieces of the experience:
Property Search
Property Details
Wireframes
The bulk of the deliverables for the project were wireframes. At certain points, I had to put together prototypes; other times, flesh out a screen more in depth, all to get buy-in from the team.
Property Search
Being the most complex page I pushed to make this experience more seamless as it had previously been entirely list oriented. Having the ability to use the map in tandem with the listings, as well as allowing potential leads to favorite/save and send an inquiry right from here increased the number of ways the brokerage would get conversions. Because of this complexity it was necessary to put together a prototype of this. To help communicate the function to the development team I created this early prototype type of the experience to display how even with more information it is possible to create a smooth and understandable experience.
Video prototype of some of the more complex interactions in the property search feature.
Property Details
Over the multiple iterations, many tactics were revealed in testing as to the ordering of things as to what would drive Leads inquire.
Image Carousel of property or area front and center
Providing a means of contacting agent about property after seeing the most important information
Drive traffic to other important pages necessary to the buying process, agents and area profiles.
Agent Details
Presenting customers with their prospective agent’s biography, the properties they represent, and customer reviews.
Agent Biography: Gives agents an opportunity to communicate their value
Agent Properties: Directly pulling from CRM
Agent Reviews: Testimonials are a tried and true marketing technique.
Area Details
A rundown of the neighborhoods prospective buyers are looking into, here are some things about this page that differ from the structure of the property details.
Marketing Insights: PropertyBase data informs buyers the economic highlights of the area
Area Features: Brokerages can customize these in the CMS to highlight selling points
Luxury Properties: Sub-category displays new developments to demonstrate area value
Final Steps
The bulk of the deliverables for the project were wireframes. At certain points, I had to put together prototypes; other times, flesh out a screen more in depth, all to get buy-in from the team.
Seb Zapisek
Creative Director
“Robert joined our design team as a UX Designer during a crucial overhaul of our entire platform. Our system was extremely complex with hundreds of nodes and paths. His role was to analyze it thoroughly and make it more user friendly which he accomplished extremely well. Rob has a thorough understanding of the UX process and took the reigns on understanding the system, the problem we and our customers were having, and how best to go about to make improvements. From careful analysis, user persona development, site architecture and user testing he was able to come up with a much more streamlined version of out offering making it much more approachable and simplified. I would highly recommend Robert for his UX skills.”