RIDC
Funneling Users Towards a Smooth Property Search Experience
Collaborators
In partnership with
Category
See it live
amulet's role
In parnership with Oyster Creative Co., amulet worked alongside 3 other team members: Jeff Barton – co-founder and president of Oyster; Suzanne Basista – a communications strategist with a well-established career in the real estate field; Georgia Streitman – the project manager. My role, amulet's role, included the following:
• Competitive Analysis
• Sitemap
• Information Architecture & Content Design
• Wireframing
• Prototype Design
• Web Development & Custom Conditional Logic
• Content Management
The problem
On the original website, it was uneasy to navigate and locate information, identify what properties were available for lease or sale, and to thus have a thorough understanding of each property given the information available at the time. This indicated that we as a team would need to decide how to consolidate and rework each page, how to best represent properties, and what copywriting we would need in order to create more in-depth page experiences for each property.
It was apparent that managing photos, amenities, highlights, associated case studies, press, community news, broker contacts, available spaces, and external links on 70+ properties required a detail page structure that was consistent but flexible if one property had more or less information over another. The ideal was to create a future-proof environment for property managers. This was achieved partially thanks to conditional logic, which meant swiftly hiding inapplicable sections depending on the location, as well as identifying consistencies CMS-wide as a team.
The solution
Identify the ideal user flow for finding and contacting about a property through weekly team brainstorming and solo design sessions that focused on a site that funnels its user to the properties page and experience. Not only, create a custom content management system (CMS) that functioned with toggles and checkboxes and utilized multi-referencing with tags.
The process
• Analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of competitors
• Worked on iterations of a sitemap with the team
• Took part in sessions with the client
• Designed low and high fidelities
• Developed the website
• Ensured responsiveness was present on all breakpoints (this was swift thanks to utilizing columns, consistent padding, and global styling site-wide)
• Designed the structure of the CMS
• Built conditional logic
• Cleaned up, consolidated, and cross-referenced property content between sites with a few rounds of QA
Summary
RIDC stands for Regional Industrial Development Company, a corporation focused on real estate, construction, and community development in Western Pennsylvania. RIDC had both important short- and long-term goals they presented when the project engagement began. The former being to better advertise its available properties; the latter to illustrate their impact on areas where they were planning to or in the process of revitalizing industry through property development.
