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MyVilla - A Premium Real Estate Web Portal - Dubai

Project Timeframe : Sep 01, 2017 - Nov 17, 2017 (2.5 Months)

Published on Behance: January 19, 2018 Quick Access Wireframe | Mockup

MyVilla Project Metadata

Metadata	Metadata Input
Project Name	Re-Design - MyVilla.com - Real Estate - Exclusively for Buying or Renting Villas and Townhouses in Dubai
Project Tagline	Search Experience Redefined
Project Summary	MyVilla is a premium real estate web portal providing an enterprise gateway for their end users to search for premium villas and townhouses in Dubai city with an unparalleled experience of rich content and user experience. The primary goal of the portal is to provide a platform for buyer (property seekers) to search premium villas and townhouses for rent or to buy and agents or agency/individuals to post their properties view sales activity through this portal
Company/Client Name	MyVilla
Project Date or Timeframe	01/SEP/2017 - 17/NOV/2017 (2.5 Months)
Your Major Tasks & Responsibilities	My role as a UI/UX Specialist was to research, design and test all UI related to the project
Platforms	Web - Responsive Web Design
Design Tools / UX Methods Used	Heuristic Evaluation, Comparative Analysis, Stakeholder Interviews (market research team), paper sketching, Balsamiq (Mid and Hi-fidelity wireframes), Photoshop (Hi-fidelity Mockups), InVision (Prototyping), A/B Testing, Preference Testing
Key Performance Metrics	Page Views, Clicks, Membership / subscription churn, Sharing pages / links, Web generated calls (unique number on website), Web fulfilled information calls, Email sign-up, Click through rate
Team Members & Collaborators	Individual Contributor
Link to FInal Project	www.myvilla.com

MyVilla Project Summary

MyVilla is a premium real estate web portal that assists buyers search for premium villas and townhouse properties in Dubai to buy or rent. The portal provides features for global end users to read, write and review comments about Agents, Agency and Individual property owners. MyVilla understands how elite user base value their time, so the portal concentrates only on the premium Villa segment and lists only verified properties thus keeping the site clutter free, clean and simple with intuitive user interface which gives great clarity for the premium buyers to decide quicker saving time. My role was to research, design and test all UI related to the project. I collaborated with market research, product development and engineering team to design and launch this project.

Design Stage	Deliverable	Findings
Discovery	Heuristic Evaluation	I ran a heuristic evaluation on the existing UI design which on the first look gave me any impression of feature oriented design than user oriented design. After spending couple of hours I understood the existing design was not in compliance with recognized usability principles. The design was not consistent and standard across Aesthetically imbalanced and was not coherent to the domain The words, phrase used in the design was not simple and was system oriented The design was oriented to recall than recognition Feedback and recovery system not concentrated Micro interactions missing Navigation poorly designed Neglecting negative space resulting in cluttered layout and display of information
Discovery	User Testing	I decided to understand our product from the users perspective and to validate the above findings tested the site with 5 users. I recruited the participants and moderated a usability test and had participants go through several tasks, and the way they struggled to find information and navigate through the system was really eye-opening.
Discovery	Stakeholder Interview	On discussing with market research team I developed a fair understanding on WHY this product been developed - which is to cater to the needs of the premium segment looking for real estate solutions like buy/sell or rent of premium villas in Dubai.WHO is the product been focused on - identified Expatriate community has the primary user base for this product. On further discussion I understood HOW they wanted the user to feel - Trusted Make them feel Important value for their money and time access to reliable information ease of use to be great All the above mentioned points should address the situational point WHEN from the user point of view. As identified earlier expat community would be the primary user base of this product, the users would use this product whenever from wherever by whoever I.E this product would be used whenever the user has a requirement for himself or on behalf of whoever - maybe a friend/colleague/ or for a family member who is thinking to relocate from wherever. A user who is living in Dubai should be able to access the premium property listings for himself or should be able to share the property details to other users across the globe.
Discovery	Competitive research	Since the user spend most of their time on other website than your website, I did a competitive research on the top most relevant competitors in Dubai. Also, since our target audience was expat community I researched the top most real estate websites on the web to understand the patterns and design standards across.
Design	Wireframes	I prefer starting out with low-fidelity wireframes to think through the structure of web pages. I used paper sketching and Balsamiq to iterate through the design process and tested with users for the flow of the page, task success rate, time taken to complete a task.
Design	Mockups	After distilling the wireframes I pushed the wireframe to mockup stage. I used Adobe Photoshop to design variants of high-fidelity mockup focusing on different layouts and characteristics of visual hierarchy (Color, font-size, contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity, negative space and style). The competitive analysis findings was referred while designing the mockups. Later ran a preference test to understand the users preference over the variants with respect to : Aesthetics which layout is easiest to interact with or makes the most sense favored choice for Log In, Sign Up and forms Which design looks the most modern? Which design looks the most trustworthy? Which design looks the most friendly?
Design	Prototypes	Seeing is believing, and user flows finally “clicked” for the stakeholders after I had them play with my Invisionapp prototype.
Design	Hand-off	To make sure the designs are interpreted rightly, implemented perfectly and to make the development process smooth, fast and effective I introduced Zeplin to our workflow. Developers were thrilled with this new change in the workflow and acknowledged that the collaboration between designer and developers was seamless.

Conclusion

I learnt a great deal throughout the project, learnt a new domain (real estate) end-to-end. I worked closely with the development team and tried to understand their mental model on why they had made certain choices and their basis for it. I learnt the gap between different stakeholders still exist but, now they are willing to look at problem and solutions offered from a designer point of view. Having development knowledge helped a lot while having discussion with the development team and developers were happy that a designer could speak their language and in turn they would value the design solutions offered with great respect.
During the user research process, I understood though the website was related to Dubai real estate it was not limited to Dubai population which is 15%. Dubai is a global city comprising 85% of expatriate population. The design had to address multiple demography and ethnography which was quite challenging.
The project had many challenges, one of the difficult piece was communicating with the remote market research team. But the most challenging part was to educate the development team how they are suppose to look at problem from users point of view and come up with a solution I.E moving them to feature centric design to user centric design. Convincing them to get rid of unwanted features which made website look cluttered, heavy and noisy was quite challenging as they would had spent countless hours developing it.
The design was no where close to having a premium and rich experience and was not in a state to be officially launched in the market. After few design iterations the product was ready to be launched and around 90+ premium real estate agencies of Dubai signed the deal to partner with MyVilla just by looking at the new prototype.
While the whole project was a huge learning experience, I especially loved iterating on designs and testing those new designs on users. This tight feedback loop helped take ambiguity out of our designs, and it felt good to produce designs with the confidence that users would enjoy and understand it.