About Property by Helander
Property by Helander is a Real Estate agent website for Abby Helander whose profession focuses on helping house hunters find homes in Sandpoint, Lake Pend Oreille, and the Coeur d'Alene area and helping property owners sell their homes.
Abby is associated with Profesional Realty Services and enjoys a successful career with overwhelmingly positive reviews from her previous clients and awards for her realty services.
Materials presented on this page are under Property by Helander and Like Media Inc. ownership. Materials presented are under copyright.
Design Journey
EXPLORING
IDEATING
IMPLEMENTING
RESEARCHING
DEVELOPING
IDEATING
REFINING
DESIGNING
USER TESTING
Website Vision
Based on the National Association of Realtors, real estate agents should have their own website to draw in more clients. This website allows users to readily find and introduce themselves to Abby Helander, giving her a more prominent digital presence.
Through this website, I was to provide Abby Helander with a personalized brand, create pages for her housing resources, and integrate her social media. Additional integrations followed with secure forms for users to get free home estimates and for Abby to track potential leads.
Format
The website is designed to allow users to learn about Abby's service as a knowledgeable local-born real estate agent, current local listings, and how a user can start the process of selling their home. The layout follows a format exhibited by most professional realtor websites divided into three main parts, the listings, the home resources, and the about/contact.
The listings portions show active listings from Bonner County and Kootenai County.
Likewise, the home resources share information about the most popular towns in each county, Sandpoint and Coeur d'Alene. This section of the website is unique compared to the rest as it is designed to be educational and engaging, appearing more like a local guide.
The about/contact sections have a general contact form as a way to let users know they would like to sell their home or hire Abby to find a home and a specialized home estimate form for users to promptly get an accurate value of their home based on Abby's local real estate knowledge.
Website UX Journey
I went about streamlining the website's user journey by creating path connects across several pages in anticipation of user behavior. For example, users on the listings page will be shown an action to contact Abby as an estate agent or to look through home resources to learn more about the listing area.
I developed a more complex and exploratory user path through the home resources pages. One of Abby's interests was to turn her resource page from a document simply into a full webpage. I saw that the resources included sections for users to explore appealing housing areas in Sandpoint and took it as an opportunity to turn the resource page into a dynamic user experience.
With the housing locations resources from Abby's resources, I created a location gallery on the home page, giving users a kind of "sneak peek" into potential areas they would like to live in. The gallery is separated into four popular categories which upon clicking, a user can branch off to either the areas in Sandpoint or Coeur d'Alene where they can view the housing location information.
Additionally, these information pages will link users to the home resources page where they can interact with a home location map and see how each location compares to others.
The Goal
The goal for creating this user journey was to turn the client's home resources into an interactive guide where users can easily find information about housing areas they may be interested in in Sandpoint and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. This builds up trust in Abby as a Realtor who understands the housing market–who not only knows how to buy and sell a home but also how to educate potential buyers on how to find the right home.
Customized Search
The client gave an interesting insight that further promoted the user experience of the website which was a home search bar. This bar would help engage users and encourage them that they can instantly start searching for properties in a very accessible area. This was also quite the challenge since the listing information was to link off to the Professional Realty Services website Abby is associated with.
However, I was able to creatively come up with a solution using database queries linked to an external source and display it in the header.
Interactive Galleries
As a fun aside in the website design process, I wanted to make the home area galleries even more dynamic through clean, coded animation.