D.R. HORTON
Desktop and mobile site redesign
THE PROBLEM
D.R. Horton's website was in need of a makeover. The site had not been touched in many years and the desktop and mobile experience were completely separated.
View the live site here.
With the full redesign, D.R. Horton was looking to accomplish two things: give the site an updated and modern feel and rebrand the entire digital presence. The site needed to adhere to user experience best practices as well as cater to our user groups. First-time homebuyers and experienced homebuyers.
D.R. Horton's site is huge, consisting of over 30,000 unique URLs. The site was built on Sitecore and utilized Coveo and Google maps.
About 60% of the traffic to Drhorton.com was from a mobile device. The mobile version of the site needed to be as user-friendly as possible. For the site to be considered a success, the mobile experience would have to be as intuitive as possible.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
18-month project from design to development.
MAKE OF THE TEAM
UX designer, graphic designer and an outsourced dev team
KEY GOAL
Improve site discovery, rebranding and optimize mobile.
MY ROLE
As the UX designer, I worked on the wireframes and overall strategy. The rebranding was a top priority but my main goal was ensuring user needs and expectations were not overlooked
I came on to the team after the majority of the user research had been done. I worked with an internal team of graphic and web designers, as well as an external designer team, to put together wireframes. Our tight timeline did not allow for actual user testing, but I made sure to put together clickable prototypes to ensure there were no holes in the flow and to do some internal testing within our team.
I was also the voice of the user. I was provided a stack of user interviews (although most of it was from our sales and marketing teams) that I combed through and tried to lean on when making decisions. User interface best practices and patterns were relied on heavily. Competitive/comparative analysis was done often. We always wanted to know what the competition was doing and we could either implement or improve on certain aspects.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
The window for designing the entire mobile and desktop site was tight. As such, our user research consisted of internal conversations with sales and marketing managers.
We relied on implementing best practices to ensure the experience was as efficient and intuitive as possible. We wanted people to know how to use our site, just like they would on any of our competitor's sites. We did a heavy analysis of the competition and worked towards implementing functionality users would be familiar with.
Homebuyers come in all shapes and sizes and experience levels. You may be dealing with a first-time homebuyer who may need a little more handholding or an experienced buyer who outsources the home search to a Realtor. No matter who was looking, they needed the ability to navigate the site easily and request information when needed. 60% of the traffic of D.R. Horton came from mobile so the mobile experience needed to be as tight as possible.
Search. Mobile. Filters
The most used functions and the most used device. That is what we were designing for. This site is literally a search engine powered by Google and Coveo, and as such, must deliver adequate results on these fronts.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
Understanding how people look for and purchase homes and making sure our site meets and exceeds users expectations.
The team conducted the user interviews and worked towards applying those findings to the final product. We were under the gun when it came to time allotted to put together comps and could have used some extra time for a bit more testing.
Unfortunately, our outsourced development team did not deliver a product that functioned properly. Developing the site was 8 months late and launched with some issues that set us back another 4 months in fixes.
In a perfect world, we would have had the time to address the shortcomings on our end and our development partner might have had a bit more experience. The entire process let us know the questions that should have been asked up front as well as cemented the importance of user testing.
THESE WERE SOME MAJOR LEARNINGS OR POINTS WE WANTED TO CALL OUT
Know your developers'
capabilities
One of our biggest issues during the entire redesign process was knowing and understanding our developer's capabilities. Knowing the right questions to ask while working on the design and functionality is key. Communication is vital.
User testing is a requirement.
Some of the issues we ran into could have been addressed with some user testing. There were a few aspects of the site the team tried to get creative with that our developers could not fully implement, leaving us with some functionality that was lacking.
Less is more and best practices
Our minimum viable product more than likely included more functionality than necessary. Our goal was to deliver a fully functional and feature-packed site as we thought our developers' could deliver on it all. We should have started with the basics and built our way up.
Realtors use the site as well.
Research conducted after launching the site discovered that a huge user group of the site was actually Realtors. The site was catered more to the consumer and did not fit well into the Realtors day. This is where the Realtor facing app concept was born.
Plan for the best, expect the worst.
We always hope everything will work out in our favor. Sometimes, that's just not the case. This project taught us all to expect he worse and have plans in place to address those worst case scenarios. Be sure to see the project from all angles.
TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK
LESSONS LEARNED
Preparation is key. From the user research to the site architecture to the prototyping. The more time spent on all of these will yield a much higher quality product.
The team was extremely proud of the product we launched. With the new site came an entirely new and exciting rebranded D.R. Horton experience. The presentation of the brands was something never done before, the added functionality was a breath of fresh air and the overall user experience was drastically improved.
The biggest lessons learned were around our communication with the development team. Working with external teams can be tough, especially with a huge site like D.R. Horton that has over 30,000 unique URLs.
Of course, the more time available for testing, research and iterations before sending comps out to the developer will always contribute to a higher quality product. This project exposed us all to the questions and concerns that need to be addressed throughout a project as well as how we should prepare for the unexpected.