Spring MLS Portals
Overview
As a Senior Product Designer for FBS's Spring Portals, a leading SaaS platform providing websites and MLS tools for real estate professionals, I played a critical role in modernizing and improving the user experience. When I joined, the product had accumulated significant design debt. My approach focused on strategically addressing this backlog while simultaneously laying the groundwork for future feature development.
A key area of focus was the information architecture. Recognizing that the existing sitemap was rigid and overly complex, I spearheaded an initiative to simplify and reorganize it. This involved a thorough audit of existing pages, leading to the removal of redundant and unnecessary pages to streamline the user flow. I then restructured the core "owner dashboard" into three distinct, refreshed dashboards, each designed with a specific purpose and user need in mind.
To ensure long-term maintainability and scalability, I implemented a brand new modular framework for the dashboards. This modular approach not only addressed the immediate design debt but also provided the flexibility needed to easily incorporate new features and functionality in the future. My work on the Spring Portals significantly improved the platform's usability, addressed critical design debt, and established a solid foundation for future product growth.
My Role
Cross-Functional Collaboration, High-Fidelity Design Delivery, Prototyping, Responsive UX/UI, Sitemap Planning, Stakeholder Reviews, User Research
Results
• Led all design for Spring Portals, resulting in a modernized and improved user experience
• Reduced design debt and improved overall UX through strategic design updates
• Improved navigation and site map simplicity by removing redundant pages
• Enhanced usability with three role-specific dashboards
• User research-driven design: 13 surveys, 7 usability studies, 15 interviews
The original dashboard design suffered from inconsistent interfaces, front-end technical debt, and a lack of established design patterns, necessitating a redesign.
This image shows the evolution of the account sitemap. The original account sitemap (left) lacked user differentiation, directing all users to the same dashboard. I identified this as a key issue and redesigned the sitemap (right) to introduce distinct dashboards for "Site Manager," "Agent," and "Consumer" roles, improving user experience and platform organization.
Redesigned Site Manager Dashboard, addressing inconsistent layouts and technical debt. Key improvements include a unified design system, enhanced typography, and a focus on familiar, navigable patterns identified through competitive analysis.
The newly designed Agent Dashboard focuses on profile management, account settings, and notification preferences, with a conditional button to access the Site Manager (for agents with website admin privileges).
The new Consumer Dashboard offers a centralized hub for managing saved properties and searches, editing profiles, and setting notification preferences. Importantly, it also facilitates connections between consumers and local real estate agents affiliated with the website. The design prioritizes a clean, intuitive interface that is sustainable for future feature additions, recognizing that this user persona has limited time and needs quick access to information.
Spring Forward: A Platform Redesign
This section showcases the revitalization of the FBS Spring platform, achieved through a user-centered design approach and the creation of a robust design system. The project successfully navigated significant design and development debt. The new design system, incorporating established design patterns, ensured consistency, improved usability, and facilitated future development, while maintaining existing functionality and adding new features.
The prior architecture, with Favorites, Collection, and Comparison features embedded within individual website themes instead of being managed at the platform level, led to complex maintenance and inconsistent styling.
I redesigned the architecture to move the Favorites, Collection, and Comparison features from individual themes to a centralized location within the Agent Dashboard. This improved maintainability, ensured a consistent user experience, and streamlined development, reducing future design debt.
Recognizing the time constraints of the target user, the Consumer Dashboard (desktop view) prominently displays an "Agent Card" next to the results, providing immediate access to agent contact information. This design is fully responsive across all devices.
The redesigned Collections feature leveraged the new design system, enabling reusable components across all dashboards. This significantly improved development efficiency and ensured consistent styling, allowing our lean team to accomplish more.
Theme Redesign & Development
This section presents my work on the website themes for the platform, a project that involved a dual approach: addressing design debt and usability issues in existing themes while simultaneously creating new, modern themes. I designed a comprehensive suite of page templates, including home pages, listing pages, agent profiles, blog pages, and search functionality, all integrated with the Site Manager dashboard for streamlined content management.
These are examples of the original website themes for the platform, prior to the redesign. These themes exhibited numerous accessibility issues, mismatched typography, inconsistent color palettes, and problems with sizing and padding. Importantly, during UX QA, I had to address these issues within the existing themes to accommodate users who were already satisfied with their current design and did not want to switch.
Based on the design system I established, I designed this new, responsive theme for the platform (desktop view), showcasing the homepage (left) and a listing page (right).
A different theme option (desktop view) for the Spring Platform, showcasing key real estate features: an active listings display, a map-based search with filtering capabilities, and an agent profile ('about') page. This theme, like all others, is fully responsive for mobile devices.