Marc's Product Portfolio

Turn London Property Showcase

Responsive Site for Displaying Turn London Properties

Client: Turn London

Project Name: www.turn.london v1

Brief Summary

Turn London is my property development business, it needed a website that could be shared with partner companies and other interested parties to showcase previously created properties.

These properties are highly unique and showing off this uniqueness needs to be prioritised in any solution. However, specific property details are not to be included as that information is only available to the end user.

Deliverables

A responsive website with the ability to add content, extra pages and new properties.

Intro

Turn London are a boutique property developer based in North London that have been operating since their first acquisition in 2011.

Their philosophy is unique, believing that great homes offer a great experience, and that their designs do this justice. They have an extreme focus on the end user experience, by focusing on how things are laid out, how they are designed and how they enhance the homes and those end user’s lives.

Like most companies, Turn London work with a number of partners and having the ability to quickly showcase the type of property and unique designs is important. This helps with a number of things, but mainly the expected end product when discussing future projects.

Problem

As the problem was relatively single purpose, the jobs-to-be-done framework helps in clarifying the situation, motivation and expected outcome for the site user.

When I am working with Turn London, I want to see their previous projects so I can quickly understand what is expected in any future project.

How might we quickly showcase Turn London's previous projects?

Research

During research, it was helpful to focus on what similar companies had previously created. However, the majority simply used the websites as a means of selling their existing properties, rather than showcasing what they had previously created.

Those that had an archive of previous projects tended to hide them away, and also generally just had photos rather than detail as well - a picture tells a thousand words probably being the thinking.

Solution

As the main requirement was to quickly and visually showcase previous projects, it made sense to put images of the properties front and centre. However, there was still a requirement to include extra pages and content that could be added in the future.

Additionally, the site needed to be responsive and this can make it challenging to display large amount of images, or an interactive gallery - a gallery would also still require a user to click through.

If the JTBD was to make it as quick as possible for a user to see previous projects, it made sense to not only put them in front of the user as soon as they visited the site, but to also automatically rotate through the images every few seconds as to showcase as many different projects and photos as possible.

The solution that was launched used Wordpess to manage photos, content and pages - with photos of properties appearing as the site background and changing every few seconds. This enabled the user to browse the site and instantly see examples, along with including any text copy, for example an about page, or contact info without impacting either the images or the text.

Conclusion

For a largely single use product requirement, the end solution fulfilled a number of needs with a simple approach that focused on the user experience.

It is easy to manage through Wordpress, with newer photos easily uploaded and content easily changed. If further pages are required, this is also straight forward.

The site is also responsive/adaptive, so works just as well on desktop, mobile and tablet.

Future iterations may focus more on creating individual pages for each property and specific information - but this is largely not a requirement, and would only be enhancing the ‘showcase’ element.

> Continue Reading

My Process

Product Process

Over the years I haven’t had a shortage of problem solving ideas, but I’ve learned to spend a lot more time focusing on and justifying what ideas and what problems most need fixing. I feel this optimised focus is where true innovation lies.

Working closely with the business and various stakeholders, initial areas or themes of interest can begin to be uncovered - areas that are a problem, and areas that an opportunity exists.

Tying this in with the business OKRs and other metrics can help drive focus on what is most important and what should be prioritised on any roadmap.

With most innovation and new ideas, there is always a risk - as someone who has lived the start up life, I like to have a rigorous focus on how to reduce that risk and tend to use the Lean Canvas template as a way of very clearly setting the project out, and defining an MVP that can reduce the risk whilst still creating value for the user.

Once I know what should be created I then begin the process of fleshing everything out in more detail; justifying the problem exists for the user, understanding it further, and how it could potentially be solved - we achieve this through switching to UX Designer mode.

UX Process

My innovation secret sauce is a toolkit that I have compiledd that can help with the entire process, from discovering the problem through research, synthesising the results, ideating, and finally implementing the design. Using these tools with stakeholders brings everyone along with the process, and can yield interesting solutions.

Discovering the problem and what lies behind it is the hardest part of the process, and only through rigorous research with user interviews and a number of other tools can the true problem be identified.

Once that research is collected, it can be organised to discover themes and other insights - which is where true innovation starts to take shape. I like to use the Jobs-to-be-Done framework as a way of defining the problem and summarising what the user is trying to achieve. The How Might We framework is then a really helpful and clear way of creating something that can help the user accomplish their goal.

Utilising my User Experience skillset I would then move in to the ideation phase as a means of teasing out those ideas and potential problem solving designs through prototyping. From there, usability testing the prototype helps iron out potential issues - design, test, repeat. Finally delivering a fully researched, fully tested on brand set of high fidelity designs that can be passed on to the development team to implement.