Auction.com is the nation's leading online real estate marketplace focused exclusively on selling residential bank-owned and foreclosed properties. It was reaching the tenth anniversary of auction.com; what better way to celebrate with a company rebrand? It was about six years since any significant brand design changes were implemented.
The Situation
- Auction.com needed to target a broader audience to increase its user base.
- An external design agency with marketing expertise developed the new brand. Subsequently, the product team was brought in to ensure the new brand was seamlessly integrated into our products, underscoring their crucial role in this redesign project.
- Our current design system had limitations, was challenging to utilize, and must be uniformly incorporated into our products.
The Kickoff
To initiate this project, the product team conducted a design workshop with the marketing team.
- Competitive Analysis
- Feature Brainstorming
- Feature Poll
- User Testing
Who were we building the homepage for?
Project Hypothesis
For those unfamiliar with Auction.com, it may not be immediately clear what our site is all about. This lack of clarity can be a barrier to engaging with us. However, by providing informative and compelling content, we can establish trust with first-time visitors and motivate them to delve deeper into what Auction.com offers.
The Homepage from before.
The Winner: Search Optimized
80% of the user testing felt more positive towards the searched optimized homepage.
Homepage Wins
Native Mobile Apps
The Problem
- Inconsistent Verbiage
- Inconsistent User Experience
- Inconsistent Visual Design
The Effort:
We have updated the style sheets for iOS and Android to ensure consistent colors, components, and type treatment. We have also begun creating a timeline for updating the tone and voice nomenclature. Additionally, our developers have started updating the codebase.
The end product.
Mobile Wins:
The Style Guide
The heart of all our products is the Design System. Our design system needed a complete visual revamp of product components and functionality.
Who would benefit from this?
- Current and future designers
- Our developers
- Day-to-day users
Divide and Conquer
Breaking all the components among the designers for weekly sync-ups to quickly update the style guide and developer toolkit.
