Overview

Oversaw the design development of a new real estate digital platform with enhanced user interaction and better competitiveness.

Context

ORPI France has the largest real estate network, with 1200 branches and a critical problem: in a fast-moving competitive marketplace, with the rise of digital competitors such as Le Bon Coin, the ORPI digital footprint was stale and fragmented.

Timeline

2015-2016

Goals

Provide seamless real estate fulfillment for the user and the agents with aligned services as a transparent, customer-centered company, advocating for ORPI's leadership positioning as the top innovative digital real estate service provider.

Users did not get access to a modernized digital engagement ecosystem: real estate agents workflow tools, user transaction funnels, and intuitive navigation. The Ecosystem as a whole suffered from digital disengagement, erosion, and gaps in operational agility.

Role & Approach

As a senior designer, I defined the design vision and strategy, and led the design team in production while ensuring alignment with business objectives.

I served as a player-coach, executing design work while building design systems and coordinating across product, sales, and engineering.

Discovery & Research

Executed market and user research, personae creation, content ranking workshops, and interviews with prospects, clients, and agents.
I studied usage analytics and analytics trends over the journeys to pains in the existing journeys.

Strategy Definition

I structured the ecosystem around key user journeys: property search → agency contact, estimate → sell, and search → buy. This framework made it possible to manage all key templates consistently across the platform.

Design Direction

Set core principles of simplicity, transparency, and empowerment.
Built frameworks to maintain cross-platform efficiency and brand evolution goals at the same time.

Execution

- Allocated the junior UX designers the granular focus of the template design.
- Prioritized production sprints which feature user-tested and validated components at next iterations.
- Design quality control and monitoring integration of iterative feedback to the process.

Key Decisions & Trade-Offs

First, we prioritized optimized user journeys for agents over breadth of features. Focus over feature creep. Second, we invested in geolocation and advanced search capabilities despite technical complexity — the payoff in user satisfaction justified it. Third, we built templates as modular components, which enabled us to scale across devices and regions without losing brand consistency.

Results & KPIs

• New user engagements through multi-criteria advanced search tools and customized client space.

• Updated back-office tools helped agents more since their workflows were fitted.

• Supported ORPI's competitive positioning by introducing new services such as digital property valuations and free ad posting between users.