Challenge

My client asked me to create an innovative new real estate platform, offering buyers and sellers complete marketplace transparency. I was challenged with leading the overall design for company's responsive web, mobile apps and other properties such as calculators, marketing pages, etc.

Solution

I've started my design process with learning more about real estate market, target audience, its needs and expectations. During all steps I had on-going communication with Client Success team, developers and Marketing & Analytics Lead. Also, I was involved in multiple usability tests with the best real estate agents and potential buyers and sellers. It helped me to understand possible weak points and avoid it on the early stages.

Our team had multiple brainstorming sessions and it was decided to reduce the number of steps for all groups of users (buyers, sellers and agents) to four. Buyers and sellers just need to join the platform, create a posting (there is an option to tag existing listings to each posting as an example), match with an agent and close the deal. Agents need to register, submit attractive proposals highlighting the services and commission rates they are willing to offer, find a match with a buyer/seller and sign the contract.

After testing and improving all wireframes I started to work on visual assets such as icons and illustrations. I wanted to avoid overwhelming users with numerous text descriptions and make user experience more engaging. As a result, user can find visual instructions, tutorials, tips and hints in all key sections of the platform.

It was quite challenging to design various types of cards for listings, postings and proposals as it contained a lot of information and in some cases even statuses. I've managed to keep it simple, responsive and appealing using principles of visual hierarchy and adding some graphic elements.