website redesign
objective
Increase user engagement and overall traffic to gain exposure and build ARX Urban's reputation. The website's design should reflect both the high-quality and innovative nature of the company. Possibly incorporate: a better way to display real estate assets with images and investment details; an "About" section of leadership; a detailed of track record and growth; a new logo; upgraded marketing and branding strategy.
skills
Competitive analysis, contextual inquiries, heuristic analysis, surveys, information architecture, user interviews, usability testing, A/B testing, site mapping, user flow, wireframing, design studio, color theory, typeface, moodboarding, rapid paper prototyping, medium fidelity sketch prototyping, high-fidelity Wix website development.
role
User research, Ideation, Prototyping
duration
3-Week Design Sprint
challenges
Arx Urban is a medium-income focused real estate investing company based in Boston, MA.
As a company that started in 2013 with only 3 employees, appealing to investors and to the community is crucial to their success.
3 main design objectives helped guide our process:
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Establishing trust & credibility in Arx
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Displaying a strong track record of successful projects
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Appealing to investors, lenders, and community members
research
Based on an internal focus group, Arx Urban had previously compiled a list of necessary website changes that we were to implement if we deemed it necessary based on user research. These changes included:
competitive analysis
Arx Urban had completed an initial competitive analysis of website elements they wanted to incorporate. Upon doing extensive research, I added a few extra competitors to eliminate potential internal bias.
The research process focused on three main user bases:
- Potential investors
- Current investors/partners
- Community of people involved in their projects.
We consulted with the client frequently to ensure we met both business and user needs. As we did not have direct access to investors, we asked the client to provide us with a user base with which we could set up interviews, surveys, and usability testing.
As the research progressed, we quickly realized getting access to real estate investors tied to Arx Urban would involve too much risk for the client. Therefore we reached our own network, interviewing an unconnected real estate investor, designers and developers (to serve as the community user base).
ideation process
1. We used user interview findings, surveys, contextual inquiries, and a competitive analysis to produce a list of features for the minimum viable product.
2. We then used mood boards and developed our initial iterations through a design studio as a team.
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3. We tested our iterations with various users to arrive at our functional high-fidelity prototype.
RESEARCH STRUGGLES
deliverables
Home Page Redesign
Before
After
About Us Page (new)
Community Page (new)
Press Page
Before
After
Contact Page
Before
After
ideation struggles
As the client reviewed each iteration, they gave us notes on specific changes to be implemented.
We quickly realized many of these changes would revert the site back to its original elements, despite user input. Though we attempted to convince the client to put the user at the forefront of design decisions, a few pages reintroduced initial features.
Final Home Page
