The concept of the business is to allow buyers to purchase houses Off-Market.
The website had to accomplish 2 goals:
1) Connect buyers with owners who are interested in selling their properties.
2) Provide tools for real estage agents to be able to conduct the Off-Market search.
These areas of the project are where I spent a heavy majority of focus: research, information architecture, wireframes, low and high fidelity mock-ups, and print materials.
I also managed 2 remote Software Developers. I was responsible for bridging the gap between our CEO and the Engineers, translating functional and technical specs to be implemented and tested very regularly.
Even though Whisper Real Estate is a local company, I regularly analyzed websites of some competing big national players to ensure we kept up with overall trends in the industry, while at the same time being careful not to sacrifice the unique style of our brand.
Personas are fictional representations and generalizations of a cluster of your target users who exhibit similar attitudes, goals, and behaviors in relation to your product.
After review of our company's data, I realized that a majority of the clients are couples. That is why I decided to create Couple Personas, which I think is more relevant to the business.
We created our own database of all properties in King and Snohomish counties and built a platform which allows us to match properties with users criteria.
Wireframing is a time saver. You can focus on the layout and will not be distracted with other design details. At these stage I also prefer to create my text styles.
For the main property card I have created couple custom icons.
Throughout this project we changed the appearance of the website a number of times.
The biggest challenge for me was having to fit extensive amount of text copy into one page.
Every designer will advocate for clean layout with lots of white space, but every business has its own requirements. As a designer you often have to compromise to meet the needs of other teams and stakeholders.
We had to obtain different house criteria for each new unique user.
I divided this process into 6 steps. Each step initially would ask you for one-click choice of most popular choices (based on our internal data).
In case your desired choice is not listed, you can go to “More Choices” and choose from more options.
For this project I have designed many different types of property cards.
The search functionality allows our agents to draw on the virtual map, filter by many different parameters, as well as apply users criteria that was received during the onboarding stage
Whisper List is a list of properties that agent has picked for the buyer based on their criteria. The website has a designated page where agent can add and organize chosen properties.
I have created and constantly updated Whisper's internal Wiki page to systematize all information and to help new hires to get familiar with our process.
Throughout the actual website I placed links to related articles in order to allow our agents to find information easily and with lightning speed.
We created our own basic CRM to manage new leads and organize our process. Main features:
All employees were assigned one out of three roles - Agent, Caller, Assistant. Each role has different level of access and can fulfill different tasks.
Based on our process I created set of stages. Each stage can be manipulated with different actions. Stages have related tasks.
You can quickly match Off-Market Properties with User’s criteria and vice versa.
I have designed all kinds of print materials including Business Cards, Brochures, Yard Signs etc.