Project concepts developed during my time at CINC, from 2012-2017. CINC's Product team wanted to explore a more collaborative home search experience that went beyond what was available at the time, as well as explore a national platform for search. Houses.net was initially an experimental playground to test out some of this functionality before rolling it to our localized client sites.
Most home search sites of the day featured the same basic functionality, with few tools to help homebuyers collect their search data in one place or collaborate with friends and family. The Dev team also needed to rewrite the codebase for our home search sites, switching from .NET to C#.
We met often with actual homebuyers and gathered data on their methods for searching and collaborating, as well as what they would like to see in an ideal search site. We consistently iterated our static and interactive prototypes to continue our learning. On the dev side, we were able to experiment more quickly and without disruption to current client sites.
Houses.net was launched within 8 weeks of conception and included a collaborative Notebook feature that was innovative at the time. Although the site itself has ceased to be extensively promoted, it is still live and used as an exploration playground. Many of the technological and UX learnings have been implemented into other areas of the CINC product suite.
Simplified search page and general overview of the site differentiators
Early prototype showing the Notebook summary page, including a list of properties the user is watching, the latest activity, and scheduled appointments, with entry points to further info sections
Screens from the first hi-fi prototype for mobile
The initial user flow of the notebook features based on discovery and research (a bit messy but it made sense to us!)