Property Sponge

Property Sponge: NYC Real Estate Aggregator

Position: Design Consultant
Length: 2 Months
Tasks: Logo Design, information hierarchy improvements, responsive and coded UI

Illustration of houses representing NYC real estate

About

Property Sponge is a fledgling startup that presents useful metrics of properties in NYC. It gives owners, buyers, and real estate professionals quick and easy access to NYC public data regarding housing, market value, and more.

The original Property Sponge site showing an unstyled, non-responsive scrolling list of raw data with no information hierarchy

The Problem

The site is currently non-responsive.

The navigation and functional use of the website lacks direction or an information hierarchy of any form. All data and images appear as a scrolling list and in raw html.

Property Sponge logo design

Brand Logo

Creating a logo and loose styleguide was an important first step in capturing a brand identity for the future UI, as well as making the site approachable at large.

This logo is a symbolic link to a user’s new home/property aspiration.

Animated demo of the dashboard toggle interface revealing property data by category

Preventing Information Overload

After 3 interviews with founders and members of the real estate industry, we distilled the weighted importance of data and presented it in 4 major categories (toggled). We also listed the sub-data of each category hierarchically according to average relevance. Key indicators were showcased on the central dashboard via quick view, the default page load.

I utilized progressive disclosure so all information is readily accessible to the user but limited unless the user selects an area of interest.

Categories | Dashboard, Overview, About Us, Mapping .

Animated demo of the mobile dashboard quick-view interface

Mobile First Design

I started with a mobile first design since the product will most likely be accessed via mobile app, due to its nature as a timely preview of properties. From the onset, users are presented with a dashboard 'quick view'.

Mobile screens showing the property info toggle menu, mapping view, and signup call-to-action

Mobile Continued

For a deeper dive, users may press on the information or 'i' button, in order to open the toggle menu. Users may view a compilation of scraped public housing data related to their search query. Users may also toggle 4 different mapping components of the related region. I've also included a project information page with a signup CTA to onboard new users.

Tablet version of the Property Sponge dashboard interface

Tablet Version

The Tablet design functions identically to mobile via an optional information button and a default quick view. The primary difference between the two is that the extra viewport allows a greater number of similar listings and corresponding data to be showcased above the fold.

Desktop version of the Property Sponge user dashboard

Desktop Overall

While the design is mobile centric, desktop offers the greatest breadth of information in a single viewing, as shown on the user dashboard page.

Responsive Front-End

These designs culminated into a fully responsive front-end UI, which is available to test. I established 3 major breakpoints based on my final designs and developed the corresponding interactions in JS.

Try Full Prototype

Designed in Figma, coded in HTML, CSS, Vanilla JS. Delivered a responsive front-end the team used as their build spec.