2023
Realtor.com
Reimagining real estate with a personalized app experience
Realtor.com’s Big Dream
Realtor.com embarked on a mission to redefine its strategic vision, ensuring that its platform evolves alongside the needs of millions of homebuyers and renters. As the design lead, I was tasked with aligning user needs, business goals, and emerging trends to create a cohesive vision that positioned Realtor.com as a leader in digital real estate.
The existing product vision lacked clarity, making it challenging for teams to innovate and scale effectively. Stakeholders needed a roadmap that balanced short-term goals with long-term aspirations while staying user-focused.
MY ROLE
Design lead
MY SKILLS
Research
Conceptualization
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Hypothesis
If we implement a fresh brand identity and modern design, then we will see higher engagement and increased organic downloads, as differentiating the app from competitors will position Realtor.com as the go-to platform for real estate, encouraging users to share the app within their networks.
Success Metrics: Long-term increases in downloads and user engagement, with leading behavioral metrics indicating sustained revenue growth per user.
Problem
The previous app, while functional, lacked distinctiveness and emotional resonance, presenting a conservative, utilitarian interface. Realtor.com needed to stand out in a competitive, “vanilla” market by infusing its brand with a strong emotional appeal that users could connect with.
7.5M
Mobile audience is well below the average of 18.8 million for competing apps
17%
Year-over-year growth trails the 23% average of other apps, indicating slower adoption
Research
We conducted in-depth user research to identify pain points, motivations, and unmet needs. This feedback guided our design direction to ensure that the app’s visual language and functionality truly reflect user desires.
Analysis
Our team analyzed key competitors, such as Zillow, to pinpoint opportunities for differentiation. We focused on features that would make Realtor.com stand out visually and emotionally.
Behavioral Archetypes
Based on thorough research and analysis, we have refined our original archetypes into three essential types to more effectively capture the various motivations and behaviors of younger, data-driven, first-time home buyers in today's market.
Narrowing our visual direction
Moodboards
&
Style Tiles
To refine our visual direction, we created mood boards and style tiles tailored to each archetype. Each mood board represented an emotion-driven design language, aligning with the motivations of our key user types.
Persona-Driven Designs
Each persona informed unique design aesthetics and functionality, enhancing engagement through tailored experiences that resonated with users’ motivations and behaviors.
We evaluated each concept's strengths to identify characteristics that aligned with our brand pillars, archetypes, and differentiators, ensuring a cohesive design direction.
A Bold New Direction
The culmination of our efforts is a bold new visual direction, serving as a blueprint for all future work. This direction emphasizes vibrant imagery, rich content, and a playful yet mature tone, delivering an experience that resonates with users during this pivotal moment in their lives.
A Unified Design System
We crafted a comprehensive design system that redefined consistency and scalability for the Realtor.com native apps. Featuring a refined type scale, expanded color palette, and custom icon library, the system ensured a cohesive visual identity across platforms. In collaboration with engineering, we introduced design tokens to standardize typography, color, and elevation, streamlining implementation and maintaining design integrity.
At the core is a centralized Figma library, empowering designers with easily adaptable components through Figma variants. With a clear typographic hierarchy and accessibility-focused color palette, the system not only enhanced flexibility but also established a unified, future-ready brand experience across the entire app ecosystem.
Rollout & Impact
The new iOS and Android apps were released with an Internal Beta for initial testing, followed by an External Beta with real users to collect feedback through usability testing and surveys, which informed refinements to the app.
The final phase was a gradual A/B rollout, allowing us to monitor key metrics and manage the user experience as the app scaled to full deployment. Red and green light metrics provided checkpoints to address any issues promptly, ensuring a smooth, controlled release.
Outcomes
After the redesign's successful launch on both iOS and Android platforms, we saw immediate results within the first three months.
16.5%
increase in unique users
4.4%
increase in lead submission revenue
Conclusion
Since launching the redesigned app, the new visual language and design system have been integrated across Realtor.com’s website and marketing channels, creating a cohesive brand experience. This redesign has set a new standard, elevating the brand and delivering a meaningful, engaging user experience.
Additional app enhancements include:
Redesigned Search Filter: A more intuitive, user-friendly search experience.
Discover Feature: A discovery tool for new home listings.
Enhanced Map Layers: Revamped layers for easier navigation and property viewing.