Before we start with any project we want to make sure we fully understand what is required. This gave the client and us a clear target. Often this is overlooked and resulting into not have a clear understanding how to bring the project to a success.

After this research period it turned out that in order for this application to be a success we should focus very heavily on information architecture. Buying a house is a complex process that involves a lot of checks and different parties that all do different parts and at the end need to come together in order to compleet the process.

Where to start?

Before we started designing or building anything we did market research. Looking at business who do the same thing, this was hard because nobody at this point has ever builded a application where the process of buying a home was fully done online. So we focussed on businesses who offer properties for sale online. There where plenty off business out there who did this. We look at the different aspects of their platforms in order to figure out what worked and what we could improve.

This resulted into a wireframes of some of the pages we knew we needed. We delibrtly tried to avoid starting with the userflow because of at this stage we wanted to only focus on the parts of the platform that we where certain off. This included the property page, homepage. login page, etc..

Information architechture

Now that we have a good understand of some of the page layouts we put this aside and wanted to focus on the brand idenity. The reason to start with the wireframe first is because during this process you end up asking questions that help define high level strategy. Having those questions answered will help us during the process of defining a brand idenity.

Together with the client we started with the colors, we wanted to look for a color-set that would be clearly visible but at the same time a little unique. This in order to reflect that the brand itself is unique. Realtyless is a one-of-a-kind and this has to be reflected in their visuals.

Creating a User-flow

After we defined the look and feel, it was finaly time for the user-flow. This was a the hardest part of the project. The scale was a lot large the regular applications. Just like any project you want to find a balance between showing data but not so much that its overwhelming. This was no different in this project except for the fact that the data sets where way larger then normal. The process of buying a house is complex and we wanted to really cut down and figure out a easy to follow process without making things so simple that it was not possible to feel in controle over the process.

Choosing the right technoligy?

Something that is often undersetimated is to take the time to research the right tools/technolgies to use. This is very important, because making a mistake in this step can result over a lot of extra costs if you want to undo something. After checking out different options we decided to go with the Laravel framework. This is very flexible and allows us to have full controle over the complex aspects of the platform. One of the requirements that made us pick the Laravel framework was the scaleability of this.

The result

After a full year of development Realtyless v1 launched. We created a marketing campange in order to create awareness and this resulted into signups within the first month of going live. We continue to build out the application and have a client feedback process in place to finetune the different aspects of the application.