My product pod worked exclusively on the property management side of Apartments.com called Rental Manager. In Rental Manager, independent owners, or "IOs", are able to advertise their property on Apartments.com, and manage their property once it's rented.
Associate UX Designer, Apartments.com website
I worked closely with product managers, developers, UX and content writers, and UX researchers.
Having to design using components from an outdated and relatively limited design system.
Due to the fact that Apartments.com sees a massive amount of traffic and user engagement, our product pods opted to prioritize the release of new designs, and observe user responses to them to inform future iterations.
Before we jump in, it's important to establish a shared understanding of the things I'll be speaking on.
They're not career landlords, and only need to manage a range of one to three properties, although most of them only manage one.
It surfaces key information about the property's listing, and provides entry points to important actions a user would need to take involving their property or listing.
A premium listing will place higher in search results, display more information on the search results page, allow the IO to upload videos to their listing, and list across the seven network sites owned by CoStar Group.
One of my product managers approached me about the fact that in the past year, we were seeing a decline in the number of Premium listings purchased by IOs. After doing some digging into the matter, he determined that the upsell present on the Property cards wasn't being interacted with enough, and therefore could be the cause of the decline in purchases.
I began the process by creating different variations based on the same general concept of visually tying the listing's performance metrics to the "Go Premium!" CTA:
However, after discussing the designs with my product manager and design manager, it became clear that none of them were cutting it.
As the discussion continued, our collective dislike of the property cards as a whole became a central talking point. In the state that they were in, they really shouldn't have been cards at all.
As a response to this, I began experimenting with ways to make the property cards more "card-like":
I spent the last bit of my day working on these redesigns, and found them to be an interesting start.
However, when I arrived back at my desk the next day, it hit me that the problem I was meant to be solving had nothing to do with whether or not the property cards should be cards or not.
IT WAS TO MAKE A CHANGE THAT INCREASED PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTIONS.
With a renewed focus on the problem, I began iterating towards the final design in collaboration with my product managers, fellow designers, developers, and UX/content writers.
In order to accommodate the larger "Go Premium" upsell, the property cards had to become a little bit taller. This height change affected all of the property cards, no matter if they were surfacing the upsell or not, so I provided new designs of the cards in all possible states:
When the design change was ready to be deployed, we were very deliberate about the timing of its release. Interestingly, there's a clear seasonality to our IOs publishing their listings. Year over year, we observed that at the end of August there's a significant jump in the number of listings published, and the number of Premium listing purchases.
We released the change during this window, surfacing the best experience possible at the moment it's going to garner the most demand.
The design change proved to be extremely impactful. It drastically outperformed 2021's premium listing acquisition metrics during the same window of high demand. This fact is particularly impressive due to the fact that a lot of money was spent on advertising premium listings in 2021, and legitimately no money was spent on advertising them in 2022.
As of October 14th, 2022, premium listing purchases are still increasing, unlike in 2021, when they had plateaued by late September.
No matter how "straightforward" the design ended up being for this project, the fact that it was highly successful reinforces the notion that simplicity should be at the top of a designer's priority list.
It's also a great reminder that prioritizing business goals and serving the needs of your users are not mutually exclusive! An effective design can contribute positively to both sides.
