Savills
A brand new web platform with streamlined IA, vastly improved search functionality and a more welcoming tone while staying true to the Savills brand.
An efficient, user friendly gui where the right data can be easily surfaced, interrogated and drilled into, enabling the savills team to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace
🏅Cited by Google: best-practice CX in search
🏅Cited by Econsultancy: example of digital excellence
The challenge
In recent years the property industry has undergone serious digital disruption. New online-first agents entered the market, intent on elbowing out the traditional players through slick digital experiences and lower fees. Savills came to BIO knowing they could no longer rely purely on their name and long history.
The opportunity
Help Savills reimagine their business and up their game in terms of both the online experience and more far-reaching service transformation. Create a powerful but intuitive search instrument that gives Savills’ people the means to efficiently interrogate their data so they can confidently validate their insights and quickly access business critical information, giving them a crucial commercial edge.
The results
A new web platform and transformation roadmap now driving change
65% increase in direct web enquiries
37% increase in traffic
58% increase in search visits
Design principles
Human
Human to Human
Conversational in our approach allowing people to complete complex tasks in a way that natural to them. Being more human to human about each digital touch point rather than human to system.
Efficient
Recognition rather than recall
Making sure we work intelligently to provide Intuitive Interactions. Using our atomic library to create a natural and familiar experience so customers can focus on completing a task, rather than learning how to complete it.
Flexible
Respecting the need for speed
We need to speak to everyone but we recognise the individual. Allowing information to be accessed easily without overcomplicating the pathways in.
The persona
As a result of thorough user research, the development team has identified a single persona that embodies the target audience for this product - estate agents.
The persona represents the typical estate agent who uses this product and encompasses their demographic information, professional background, goals, and challenges. This information has been gathered through various research methods such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
Having a single persona allows the team to better understand the target audience and their needs, allowing them to make informed decisions and tailor the product accordingly. It also ensures that the product remains focused and relevant, ensuring a better user experience for the estate agents who use it.
The user journey
Before the introduction of a new database, Jane's user journey involved receiving a client request and gathering information about the client's needs, but she would quickly become frustrated when using her limited and inefficient database to search for properties, leading to delays in finding the right property for her clients.
Initiate a search
The Query Builder
The goal of this search feature is to simplify the user experience by using natural language and intuitive functionality.
Human Language
Personal welcome and friendly language help keep the experience light while guiding users directly to key actions.
Complex made easy
This search is complex both in operation as well as data for refinement. It is important to keep actions obvious and break them into simple steps. This starts with asking a single starting action that intelligently categorises functionality to follow by vertical chosen.
Understanding user needs
The result of our search builds a complex search query with numerous operations applied. Understanding users may want to quickly re-run past searches, meaning there is high value in allowing them to save and re-run searches right from the start of a journey, so that they can access results fast.
Consulting the data
The beauty of data
Bring data points to life in a way that is both easy to use but also a pleasure to interact with.
Simplicity in approach
Creating a collation of data that is easy to scan using a stripped back colour palette that follows our design language which helps with aiding in digestion of complex information
Modular comparisons
Allowing data to be made modular - customised to a users needs. Being able to have these modules all in ones place to aid with quick comparisons. Add and remove charts when you need them.
