Referral Exchange

Referral Exchange is a free online service that connects home buyers and sellers with local real estate agents who best fit their needs. The platform includes only top-performing real estate agents from leading brokerages nationwide, which makes Referral Exchange a reliable and trusted service provider. Also, it provides excellent customer support by using sophisticated technology and advanced data science to match experts and clients together.

The work covered real estate website development: a mobile-first landing page that helps realtors connect with clients and close more deals.

When speaking about the real estate industry, it's critical to understand that most home buyers and sellers primarily come to the web to search for the service. And to be that efficient, real estate needs to shift its focus toward online platforms to meet the needs of contemporary customers. Hopefully, the Referral Exchange team knows that and even more — wants a better experience for their clients.

That is why they asked for help providing smooth online communication between their two audiences – real estate experts, and home buyers and sellers. Experts are notified via text and email messages — they know that it's vital to respond very quickly to win the business. Still, Referral Exchange wanted to leverage their job efficiency by providing a convenient and easy way to reach the seller.

Thus, we were tasked to create a clear interface where an agent coming from the text message could easily find all the necessary data and immediately contact the client without having to perform multiple actions. And since notifications were sent to mobile, it was integral to craft a mobile-first experience that would streamline the real estate side handling of the referrals.

Also, to advance productivity and efficiency, the Referral Exchange team asked us to create an easier and quicker way to get feedback on the expert's progress of their referrals. That would allow them to apply for prior relationship status, building a mutually beneficial relationship with the company.

A series of meetings with the client settled the details. The client came to us with the wireframes, so we had to design the landing page according to the Referral Exchange style guidelines to maintain consistency across all channels of communication. As the client sent us the design specifications, we started examining them to set up the right direction for our work.

We created several user flows that allowed us to see the main touchpoints and areas to work with. The initial landing page lacked clear structure and logic. The cause lay in numerous content blocks that were cluttering a small mobile screen. And to manage that issue, it was essential to place the content in a way it would be easy to perceive. Our designers did an excellent job by employing a visual hierarchy to highlight the most important information and shift the user's focus to the CTA block on the landing page.

As for the seller's contact information, we highlighted it with the help of typography and color, so it was instantly recognizable and readable yet not interfering with the CTA or other elements. We took bold fonts and colors for the primary information, including the name of the seller, the price point, and contact details, and more neutral yet readable colors for the secondary data.

After, we proceeded to the contact CTA block, where it was critical to prioritize the calls to actions according to their importance — calling was the best option while texting and emailing were the second major. We decided to highlight the calling button with a bright color compatible with the style of the landing page.

In case the agent rejected the referral, we had another user flow designed at the initial stage. There, we crafted a simple form where the agents could choose one of the options to explain their decision. That would advance more prolific feedback the company wanted to get.

Ultimately, the client got a mobile-first experience that does a better job organizing information for experts and streamlines their handling of referrals – higher engagement, more closed deals.