A Place for Mom

Community Central - An internal tool for “Community” partners to create, manage, maintain and track their listings & leads.

As Head of Design at APFM the team worked on a number of internal productivity tools for our customers. Community Central, a management tool that allows partner communities to upload, manage, and track their “profile” pages on our sites was in need of a major overhaul.

The site hadn’t been worked on in years, was confusing to use, had a very outdated look, and was on an outdated technology stack.

We designed a ground up solution that included reviews of user flows, personas, new IA, new visual treatment, along with a new and updated styleguide and design patterns. Both desktop and mobile were included.

 

My team developed segmented personas and journey maps, and conducted user studies to help identify where the current sites were missing the mark. We wanted to understand what our users were thinking at the various steps along a very emotional journey.

We then set out to completely update the visual brand treatment, define and create new styleguides and pattern components and overhaul each site.

 

Key Insights & Drivers

  • Outdated UI

  • Ineffective mobile experience

  • Difficult navigation

  • Mixed messaging and confusing brand

  • Difficult to manage accounts and leads

  • Poor search experience

 

Dashboard: Decisions & Impact

Updates

  • Profile completeness score

  • Leads categorized by type

  • Notifications

  • Upcoming schedule

  • Community list

Results

  • Ability to more quickly access timely leads

  • Quickly see lead count and tours

  • Quickly jump between multiple communities

 
 

Leads: Decisions & Impact

Updates

  • Updated navigation bar and search

  • More intuitive segmentation of content

  • Cleaner UI and content hierarchy

  • Addition of best-practice advice & page scores

  • Improved page load times

  • Improved leads readability 

  • Addition of visual cues to aid in productivity

  • Modernized UI with filter and sort

  • Designed for mobile

Results

  • Measurable uptick in unique metadata updates

  • Noticeable improvement in image uploads

  • Positive feedback from focus groups and user study

  • Less confusing to manage leads based on feedback

  • Better ability to manage, sort, and understand status