Neighborhoods.com
As the Founding Designer, I created the brand and designed the MVP product experience. Designed and built entirely in-house, Neighborhoods.com’s objective is to broaden the focus of your home search to consider the home and the neighborhood you are buying in. How do you capture something as ubiquitous as '“neighborhood”? Start by building a brand from the ground up and design a real estate site around that research.
My role: Founding Product Designer, Head of Design
BRAND DEVELOPMENT
USER RESEARCH
PRODUCT PLANNING
DIGITAL DESIGN
PHOTOGRAPHY
MARKETING
Build the brand—from the ground up.
Plenty of real estate sites will show you the house—how many show you the neighborhood? When premier active adult community website 55places.com seized the opportunity to build a real estate site that focused not only on the home but also on the neighborhood, they established their first in-house engineering and design team. As Founding Designer, I led and grew that team from zero to one, then five. My team was tasked with research, digital & traditional design, A/B testing, and roadmap ownership while working collaboratively with our Engineering, Marketing, and Sales teams.
“The reason we built Neighborhoods.com is to help you find the perfect neighborhood and home. Our resources and expertise help you to make one of the biggest decisions of your life by answering your questions like “What is life like in this community?” and “What is life like on a Friday night and Sunday afternoon?”
How do you capture the essence of “neighborhood” in a logo? Think of how different your perspective is of what “neighborhood” means based on your own personal experiences. Urban vs. suburban vs. rural and everything in between, plus geographical differences, influence your perception.
The development of the icon is rooted in the idea that all neighborhoods are made of shapes. Those shapes may be strict lines or more organic, but there are lines within and lines that define a neighborhood.
Minimum Viable Product Process
MVP Launch
Six engineers and a designer launched the MVP in 5 months. The first market was our home market, the Chicagoland area. The modular nature of the design allowed for a cohesive experience as new markets were added even when they may not have as much in-depth content.
As Google indexed the site, our SRP ranking organically increased dramatically. Paid search was the primary funnel for traffic, but within a few months, organic traffic outpaced paid.
Building an Experience Design
Research, Hypothesize & A/B Experiments
There are numerous unknowns with a brand-new website, but you need to start somewhere. Research with stakeholders, real estate agents, benchmarks from the travel industry, and a survey of the competitive landscape to determine the initial path the site would take.
Once the MVP was launched, we observed simple metrics like bounce rate and time on site. Features that did not make the MVP we added and a robust testing practice was created within the design team and executed in collaboration with project management, engineers, data scientists, and marketing analysts.
Confirm… and iterate.
A/B tests, In-person & remote usability testing, and surveys were conducted to gather additional qualitative research. As the A/B practice matured and had our share of failed tests, we learned much and built on those learning to move faster. Examples of methods used by the team:
Remote usability testing
Top tasks & Card sorting
A/B test
Multi-variant tests
Concept tests