Balfour Beatty Corporate Website
Overview
Balfour Beatty Communities is one of the nation's largest owners and managers of high-quality residential housing. Their portfolio represents a diverse mix of multifamily, military, student communities, and single-family residences. Headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania Balfour Beatty values corporate culture, innovation, and expertise. Balfour headquarters reached out to LeaseLabs to solve significant creative objectives.
1. To create a dynamic search functionality that can accommodate different ways for people (users), to pinpoint their ideal living area.
2. Incorporate a more personal approach not only for prospective renters, but for investors, developers, and employees.
Responsibilities
UI, UX, Mobile, Web, Video
Research
Interviews:
To gain insights on current trends and how users behave when looking for apartments, I conducted interviews with 3 groups of people.
-
How do you search for apartments or new places to live?
-
Do you prefer an all in one experience?
-
How do you like your results displayed?
-
Are you planning on moving alone or with others?
-
What are their moving habits? How often do you move?
Results:
After evaluating some of the preferred practices these users took and what motivated them, here are the following discoveries:
-
Usually through an associated app, like Zillow or Apartments.com
-
Most prefer all in one experience (if displayed well)
-
Categorical results are preferred so people can filter through their listings (states, bedrooms, list views, etc)
-
About a 60/40 on people who are moving with others vs alone.
-
Most users rely on map and list views to show their results.
Client Goals
• Target Residents – Existing and Prospective
• Employees – Existing and Future
• Institutional / Investment Partners
• Community/state map
• Property details
• Separate resident portal links
• Update Nav menu
• More customizable widget areas that we can turn on/off on all pages that we can use for various highlights as things come up –
User Flows
Colors
Primary
Hex #184a87
Hex #223746
Hex #70e0c1
Secondary
Hex #fbc556
Hex #8a8a8e
Typography
Viva Beautiful Pro
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ! @ # $ &
Europa Regular
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ! @ # $ &
Trade Gothic Bold
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ! @ # $ &
Iconography
I chose an angular search functionality approach, where a user types in a field and it shows predictive results in the dropdown and is filtered on the search page.
In order to accommodate the various ways people search for properties, I also included the map view and list views.
A. The map will suffice if there are abundant properties scattered across the county, and some people prefer the visual route on selecting their state.
B. Secondly, a list view is also included to accommodate for those users where geography is not their strong suit.
Per the client's secondary request on ensuring residents can access their resident logins for each corresponding property, I made sure to provide an accessible functionality that enables any resident to login to their resident portal to:
• pay rent online
• create maintenance requests
• explore apt availability
As their secondary goal, the importance of unifying their existing employees, and capturing their future employees was another main goal of the website. They wanted to break up the rigidness of their previous website and offer a more well rounded, inviting experience that also incorporated a healthy balance of playfulness mixed with lifestyle photography. At the end of the day, people ignore design if design ignores people, so we had some fun here on the careers page.
