muze
Website Builder for Real Estate agents
Product Designer • 2019 • B2C, Desktop Web
Overview
Modernizing the real estate industry
Muze is on a mission to revolutionize the real estate industry by providing a platform where agents can create high-quality property websites in minutes.
Our team was asked to create an MVP website builder with accompanying templates.
Problem
Real estate agents find marketing essential but time-consuming
A real estate agent’s main goal is to sell homes to as many buyers as quickly as possible, and they know the value a high-quality property website can have on their sales. Research uncovered that marketing is an extremely time-consuming and inefficient process that needed to better support their on-the-go lifestyle and goals.
How might we help real estate agents quickly create property listings to increase home sales?
research
Real estate agents like efficiency but not at the cost of quality
Based off competitive and comparative analysis on 10 different companies, including Squarespace, Wix, Placester, Compass, and Redfin, and the client’s user research, I noted the following key insights:
Designs
A template that inspires buyer action
According to research, we learned that as much as real estate agents valued a time-saving workflow, they also valued a beautiful and informative end product that attracted home buyers. It was important to design a product around these core user needs.
Some key elements of the final template design:
• Clickable announcement bar that provides easy access to agent and encourages users to take action
• Large, eye-catching visuals to aid scannability and quickly increase buyer interest and engagement
• Relevant agent details to build trust with the buyer and urges them to reach out to the agent
Designs
A web builder that prioritizes efficiency
The main goal was to help agents quickly launching sites to increase home sales. Some key elements of the final builder design:
• Icons and dark hover overlay to clearly indicate actions that can be taken
• Tool tips and helper text to progressively educate user of editor functionalities leading to a frictionless editing experience
• Live changes and auto-save to increase efficiency and support the agent’s on-the-go lifestyle
validation testing
Adding copy and a clear CTA to reduce friction
We conducted validation testing on 6 users to see if the template met their standards and if they understood how to use the website editor. Here are the results:
6/6 users were able to edit text on the template
5/6 users were able to edit photos on the template
5/6 users said they liked the template
Testing provided helpful feedback related to the photo editor, as I noticed a bit of hesitation and extra clicks when users were going through tasks. I was able to identify these areas of confusion and made adjustments to the designs.
Before
After
Final Designs
A seamless and efficient website building experience
We created a modern template that works with different home and image styles with a seamless editing experience that helps real estate agents focus on what matters most – meeting and interacting with potential clients and closing homes.
Learnings
A product with UGC requires versatile designs
As this product can be used by various agents with a diverse range of content, it was crucial that we designed to support these scenarios. We created a warm-colored template, but with a focus on neutral tones to support a wide range of UGC. We also designed for long addresses and specified in the engineering hand-off documents how the templates should respond.