Case Study
A global leader in the real estate software industry needed to add to their in-house UX team to modernize and reimagine their SaaS platform with the goal of enabling real estate companies to elevate their business and gain a competitive edge.
I managed a UX consulting team of 3 as we integrated into their internal teams and build processes. Over our 11 month engagement, we quickly ramped up our knowledge of the industry and their product suite to provide immediate value and bandwidth to the team as we rapidly iterated to add features, modernize the experience and improve usability while documenting our work in a new design system to streamline future development.
UX Consulting Team Lead * Stakeholder Workshops * Discovery Research & Analysis * Concept Ideation * Wireframing * Creative Direction * Visual Design * Process / Workflow Visualization * Prototyping * Design System Contributor
Microsoft Powerpoint * Microsoft Excel * Adobe Photoshop * Figma
As we onboarded to the internal project team, we began discovery, research and scoping activities, conducting workshops with project stakeholders while documenting everything we learned about the processes involved in the real estate management industry and the regulations they must comply with.
We discovered that the overall application would need to consist of many related modules that would enable different business functions and worked with the internal team to identify all of the required modules, the features required for each module, the estimated level of effort to design and build each module, and any dependencies between modules.
We then moved to capturing requirements for each feature that would need to be built. There were a large number of modules and features in each so we focused our efforts on documenting items that we would work through first in our early sprints. We then wrote user stories for each requirement, ensuring everyone on the team was aligned on why we needed to build each feature and how they all fit together.
At this point, we zoomed back out to a 10,000 foot view and spent some time capturing how we thought all the processes and actions would fit together to create high level structure and navigation diagrams for the application suite that could be vetted and refined with the larger team.
Engaging, role-based dashboards intuitively lead users to the information they need to manage their business while minimizing clicks. Forms, calendars and tabular data are minimal and clean and use color to call attention to key data. A familiar bento box style was employed on many screens to help focus attention and give users an overview of detailed reports. Popovers enabled inline editing of certain information while keeping users in the context of the current page.
Overall, the design aesthetics and usability were upgraded from a Windows 95-like, buggy, legacy application to a modern, clean and highly-functional SaaS platform that helps real estate companies to elevate their business and gain a competitive edge.
As new elements and components became approved and moved into production, they were integrated into the design system for future reuse. Light and dark themes added flexibility of use on white or dark brand color backgrounds.
MANY screens had to be designed, and our design system really helped us increase our output and move faster by having common elements like buttons, form fields, error states, tabs and menu items standardized across the platform. As the library grew, it enabled the team to focus more on user needs while shipping product updates more efficiently.
