Building Online Success for a Commercial Real Estate Company
Transwestern Website Redesign & Development
OVERVIEW
Transwestern is a privately held global provider of commercial real estate services, with 35 U.S. offices and an alliance with BNP Paribas Real Estate that expands Transwestern’s reach to 180+ offices in 37 countries. They pride themselves on delivering exceptional value-added services such as Agency Leasing, Advisory Groups, Tenant Advisory, Capital Markets, and Asset Services, to investors, owners and occupiers of all commercial property types.
Transwestern's website was failing visitors with confusing navigation and hard-to-find information.
Discovery
Kicking this project off with an in-depth Discovery phase, we conducted user interviews with four distinct teams within Transwestern: the Brokerage Group, the Executive Team, the Research Group, and the Marketing Group. Our interviews uncovered the main frustrations with their current site, and helped us outline the goals that would drive the redesign.
Transwestern stakeholders were interested in improving four key areas of the website: property listings, employee search, research reports, and service pages. More specifically, they wanted to:
- Be able to find all the research reports
- Easily search for and find relevant property listings
- Be able to search for and find employee bios and contact information
- Have useful and informative information on the service pages
In addition to conducting user interviews, we also ran a card sort, followed by a tree test. We heard repeatedly during our interviews with the Transwestern stakeholders that the site was difficult to navigate, and thus made it a priority to validate the new proposed navigation structure using these two user tests. The tests turned out to be pivotal in helping us identify areas of the navigation that would still be confusing so we could make tweaks before committing to a structure.
before
UX Strategy
During the UX strategy phase, we used our learnings to design the site architecture and create wireframes. Our wireframes served as “blueprints” for the site layout and allowed us to quickly test ideas to make sure we were optimizing the user experience.
In order to address the goals outlined for the redesign, we paid particular attention to the user touchpoints on the research reports page, property listing page, employee bios section, and services section. We laid the foundation during the UX Strategy phase to make these pages easy to use to find the information the website visitor was looking for by incorporating advanced search and filter features, and laying out content to tell a cohesive story.
Build
Before long, it was time to jump into design. Using Transwestern’s brand guidelines, we designed the look and the feel of the website to be consistent with the rest of Transwestern’s marketing materials. Before getting too deep in the design, we set up a 5-second test to make sure the first impression of the designs resonated with target website visitors.
Once the designs were finalized, we started the development integration. There were several complexities that we had to tackle during the programming phase. We developed the site on a flexible, custom .NET framework, and integrated with several third party platforms to pull in content for various sections of the site, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Workday, OneLogin and an xRM, which we used to pull in property data. We developed the site using the latest responsive technology so that visitors would have a great experience across all devices – whether they’re viewing it on a TV, desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.
Test & Launch
Extensive testing was required after development to ensure that all the dynamic fields on the site were pulling in the correct data.
For example, on the employee section on the site, there were several conditions programmed into the logic to show or hide employees based off of department, and to pull certain employees dynamically into different contact sections on the site.
After thoroughly testing everything and making sure the correct employees and properties were being pulled onto the site, we prepped for launch, and transferred everything over for Transwestern’s internal IT team to take the site live.
Closing Thoughts
Learning about key concerns and frustrations through user testing enabled us to put together a successful strategy for Transwestern’s redesign. The professional and elegant designs compliment the robust custom CMS platform that allows the marketing team to keep the website fresh and up-to-date with relevant content. With a winning site to aid business development efforts and impress potential clients, Transwestern can now be confident they are delivering an extraordinary experience to their online visitors.
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