Ivy Gate

UX / UI / Front-end & WordPress Development

Ivy Gate homepage design

About the project

Ivy Gate provides a personal, bespoke home sales and letting service that depends on a high-end, professional web presence - the company was a pioneer in the online-only estate agency model that has become hugely popular in the property industry.

The existing sales and marketing website needed technical updates after being live for a number of years, so we took the opportunity to look at how the existing UI was serving user needs and consider where we could redesign aspects to improve user experience and optimise for a higher conversion rate.

Ivy Gate property website example

Identifying user experience issues

In order to understand where users may be having difficulties carrying out primary tasks, we looked at how key user journeys currently worked on the site, and where potential customers were dropping out of the sales funnel. Our main areas of concern were around how easy it was to start a property search, how simple it was to drill down to a particular type of property, and if we were enabling users to take a clear course of action to book viewings once a desirable property was found. We also wanted to improve booking rates for property valuations.

We used Hotjar to perform some basic user experience research, generating heatmaps and screen recordings to uncover which areas of the current interface design were confusing to users so we could consider how to bring increased clarity to the redesign. We also discovered we could remove a number of steps from the existing valuation booking flow, reducing the number of actions a user had to perform before a successful booking could be made.

User behaviour analytics graph for conversion funnel
User behaviour analytics screen recording

Translating UX findings into more effective UI design

With the details uncovered by the user behaviour research, we were able to confidently approach the new UI design with some informed decisions, such as making key call-to-action buttons clearer and more prominent on each screen, making a filtered property search more immediately available on the homepage, improving the information density on property listing pages, and removing some superfluous pages and steps from the interface entirely.

Ivy Gate homepage UI design - before and after comparison
Property archive view
Single property view