User experience and consolidation

Raine & Horne is an iconic Australian brand and a household name, strongly associated with Australian real estate since 1883.

The Raine & Horne suite of websites (Raine & Horne Residential, Raine & Horne Commercial, Real Ops & Fusion) had been created independently of each other over a period of years and required a thorough UX process to provide a better user experience by combining all four sites into one. An updated look and feel was also needed to bring the site into line with current branding.

The Challenge

Raine & Horne’s existing website had a splintered UX and UI and therefore suffered from poor analytics results and unclear user flows.

Flowing on from this issue was the fact that four websites were to be incorporated into one, with a wide range of content types. This required a complete overhaul of the navigation structure and IA.

Finally, whilst in the design phase, branding was being updated by Raine & Horne, so a design direction was chosen that was felt to be neutral while also staying loyal to the brand.

The Process

Discovery

Competitor Analysis was done on key competitors to compare against our initial thoughts and benchmarking was also done.

An extensive heuristics analysis was done on the existing websites to find points of weakness that could be improved. Some key takeaways were an abundance of content redundancies mainly due to their being no consistent content structure, Inconsistent navigation, a large number of dead ends.

IA & wireframes

Information Architecture was a key consideration as the Navigation and content sections were poorly labelled and contained a lot of redundancies throughout the four websites. A big challenge was the naming conventions for the Navigation as certain pages contained a mix of content that wasn’t easily catagorised.

Based on the above we developed wireframes, with a clear goal in mind to incorporate the large amount of information from four websites into a concise and easily navigable experience. Research showed that users interacted with the “Agent, Area, Office” search on the existing site, so that feature was made more prominent.

Content sections weren’t clearly defined leading to a sense of being overwhelmed, so whitespace was increased site wide.

Creative design

Design for the UI has to be as neutral as possible while also creating areas of interest that we could easily altered when the final branding was complete.

The gold colour was used as a highlight to draw the users eye and imagery was boosted in size and prominence to better create an aspirational mood throughout the website and to let users clearly explore the properties.

Development

The new web experience was built on a well known open source platform “Umbraco” that was customised to the clients needs and was super easy to use to update content. From there we complete the UAT process and packaged up the final site for hosting by the clients I.T team on their chosen environment.

Colour

The Solution

Raine and Horne’s four websites were successfully combined into a single coherent website that offered users the core features they were after and clearly defined content areas which providing an easy to use content management solution and admin area.

Raine & Horne’s business goal of users contacting their agents through the contact details on the website was also achieved through more prominent CTA’s.