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Brief
Anton Kreil, a high profile UK entrepreneur and star of the BBC’s TV show ‘Million Dollar Trader’ approached Cyber-Duck with his vision to transform the UK property market and bring a fairer approach to buyers and sellers. He wanted to converge social media with online property listings to offer a place where people can manage the whole process of buying, selling and renting a property online, while cost-effectively sourcing all relevant service providers, without the need for estate agents.
Strategy
Our role was to transform this business vision into reality, while strictly adhering to the stringent regulatory and legal regulations of the UK property market. The project involved devising the website logic, formulating the architecture, designing the website, implementing Web 2.0 technologies and performing a beta launch to obtain real user input.
Anton Kreil chose us as it was clear that user experience was a critical factor in realising his ambitions. Consequently, we engaged in a thorough process of analysing the business requirements, creating flow diagrams, sitemap and wireframing all front end and backend pages to cover all types of user and client experiences.
The output of this planning phase enabled ua to engage all key stakeholders in an interactive process that ensured all scenarios were well catered for.
Furthermore, brainstorming at the early stages resulted in agreeing upon a wide range of social interaction features for later implementation; including not just property profiles and viewings calendars, but also friend request features and a bid management system to source the most cost effective and reputable HIP providers, conveyancers and all other relevant service providers.
Execution
Although designed to be extremely easy to use for all site visitors, behind the scenes the Hablib system is extremely complex. The site includes a wide variety of AJAX functionalities such as suggestive search, affiliate support, integrated payment gateways and APIs with other companies. Furthermore, all automated processes were designed to strictly adhere to the many regulatory requirements involved in offering property sales services.
Results
Despite all of the backend complexity behind Hablib, the end result was a consistent and simple end user interface for all external Hablib.com users and backend administrative roles. Furthermore, just 8 weeks after launch the site was already generating significant interest with a new first time buyer registering every 20 minutes.
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