Initial situation

Rightmove was having difficulties with their consumers product development efforts. There was insufficient coordination among separate agile teams, and user research wasn’t applied optimally to shape the products. A gap had also opened between the Development and Design teams, making effective collaboration difficult.

I shaped a product vision and generated buy-in to achieve key business objectives

While I was keen to build on the success of the Rentlondon experimental app (see next project slide), I knew I needed to bring the rest of the company onboard. I designed several collaborative workshops so we could improve our experience map with more internal knowledge, and ensure the full product development team had confidence in it.

I was able to propose, advocate, provide evidence for and help deliver a more integrated product vision, improving key business metrics (number of leads, property viewed, retention…) thanks to a set of coherent new features across product teams (image carrousel on search result, possibility to hide a property from results, personal notes, seeing saved properties on map).

I improved the skills and output of the Design team

• I added process to improve the effectiveness of the team by introducing Trello as a workload management system, helping the full team understand what work was ongoing so we could prioritise it, allowing us to review the work before it was finalised.
• I facilitated design critiques with the team to help designers improve their work without being told what to do, helping them arrive at more usable solutions (especially in our new design system).
• I coached them to better develop and present their design rationale, leading to better work that was better received.
• I took the lead hiring the new Senior UX Designer and Researcher, UX Designer and UX Researcher whom I then line-managed.

I bridged the gap between the Design and Development teams

• I ran several internal presentations on User Experience, and the strengths and pitfalls of key User Research methods, helping to both demystify and create more respect for this design and research work.
• I continued this throughout all my individual conversations, especially with the product teams leads.
• I ensured we ran more frequent and better usability testing sessions, which now involved the Product and Development teams.

This created a virtuous cycle: it increased transparency and built trust, creating a desire for more, which helped improve the understanding of design challenges, and eventually led to a much better collaboration between Design and Development.

I did hands-on work

My Rightmove

I provided the vision, information architecture and initial wireframes, then supervised the design for an incrementally released new responsive My Rightmove. This decreased the bounce rate by over 60%, increased session duration by 33%, and allowed the adition of new features solving customer needs).

Lead Valuation Alert

I led a responsive redesign of a business-critical form, increasing conversion and eventually increasing revenue by over 20%.

After ensuring usability and checking it with usability testing and Hotjar session recording, the key challenge here was to provide transparency as to what this form did (send your details to Estate agents) while still maximising conversion.

Getting the best result involved many iterations released with successive A/B testing. It was achieved by being careful how often we mentioned the estate agents, and what language we used (estate agents tend to have a poor reputation).

iOS and Android App redesign

I addressed the biggest usability issues, improving key activity metrics (saved properties number).

Our deeper redesign of the iPad app to support iPad multitasking will eventually see it merge with the iPhone app. As this required a rework of large part of the app, I provided several options to the product owner to accommodate constrained development resources. (Visuals withheld as the work has yet to be released.)