1. Challenge & Strategic Alignment

The project’s goal was to modernise the user experience to address high friction in the property search and lengthy application processes, directly supporting the core business goals.

Business Goals: Boost overall brand engagement (stickiness), improve registrations and property enquiries, and establish a more professional and inclusive brand identity.

Strategic Kickoff: Drove the design process from initial workshops with directors and managers, ensuring design decisions were rooted in measurable outcomes and addressed specific user pain points previously logged in client data.

2. Process, Team, and Design Phase

The project involved a lean, highly focussed team, prioritising a mobile-first approach as 80% of traffic originated from small devices.

Roles

Design Leadership & Execution: Myself (Design Lead & End-to-End Designer). I drove the overall strategy, subsequent UX/UI design and brand application, while collaborating closely with our UX Designer on all research and initial structural design.

UX Deliverables: The UX Designer was specifically responsible for producing the early-phase wireframes based on our shared research findings.

Team Members: Frontend Developer (WordPress specialist), Project Manager, Commercial Director, and Marketing expert.

Design phase and testing strategy

Design Phase: Lasted three months and utilised focussed design sprints, with design rationale regularly presented directly to the client for immediate feedback.

Testing Strategy: Implemented a lean, targeted testing strategy: internal QA combined with a small focus group of current and past users. This validated that the new design successfully solved their reported pain points from the previous site.

3. Execution & Goal-Driven Design

The execution delivered a visually appealing and highly functional experience, built on a scalable design system and focussing on complex transactional workflows.

Foundational Systems

Design System Implementation: I created a Design System within Figma to maintain consistency and provide a single source of truth for the new digital brand. This system ensured all visual elements, graphic motifs, and components were immediately scalable across the main site and subsidiary projects.

Scalability & Reach: Demonstrated the system’s flexibility by delivering a microsite for their yearly property event and a white-label site for the london.gov.uk shared homes initiative.

A. Core Strategy & Information Architecture

Property Search Overhaul: Implemented SearchSmartly allowing users to find properties based on saved places (like work) and travel distance. The search results page was improved with a better map view to prioritise location data.

Information Architecture: Upgraded the overall site architecture. A major focus was the creation of multistep guides and templates for new landing pages, significantly increasing site stickiness and supporting marketing efforts.

B. UX/UI Components (Conversion & Engagement)

We engineered complex components and transactional flows that were previously major user pain points:

User Portal: Completely redeveloped the Personalised User Area (User Portal) for effortless management of user details, saved properties, and access to interactive tools like the Montage Calculator.

Form Conversion: Because shared ownership requires large credential forms, we built the User Area to allow users to auto-fill these complex forms across the site, which was a critical time-saver.

Simplified interface: Property details pages were kept clean and minimal with more detail available through discreet sheet/tray interactions, optimising the experience for mobile users.

4. Measurable Impact & Results

The design strategies directly addressed the commercial objectives, resulting in significant growth.

Improved Conversion Rates (20% Lift): The Personalised User Portal was key; by enabling auto-fill for large credential forms, we drastically reduced the friction and time required for high-intent applications/registrations, directly increasing conversion rates by 20%.

Boosted Engagement & Search: The smart search features (by travel distance/saved places) and the clean, mobile-first property detail pages successfully enhanced stickiness and user satisfaction, validating the design strategy.

Summary

The comprehensive refresh delivered a visually appealing, highly functional, and mobile-first experience, validating the strategy that solving core transactional pain points is a direct driver of commercial value.