Savills Property Website Design
January 2017 - November 2017
Savills plc is a global real estate services provider on the London Stock Exchange. With an international network of more than 700 offices and associates throughout the Americas, the UK, continental Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, offering a broad range of specialist advisory, management and transactional services to clients worldwide.
Recognising that the real estate industry is next in line for a shake-up in terms of service offering, so they came to Bio looking for a 'digital disruption defence plan'. Savills approached Bio, looking for a partner to help transform their digital service offering, ensuring the customer remained at the forefront of their outputs.
The beginning of a five-year service design strategy
The new Savills website formed part of a five-year service design strategy to strengthen Savills' position as a market leader in the real estate sector. The new website led the charge in terms of best-in-class search methods including features like predictive search, region search, draw a map to search local areas and collaborative search functions.
It was my job to lead the redesign, overseeing all aspects of the site rebuild. Leading a team of UX and Product designers whilst working closely with the Savills in-house developers and our own team of Bio developers to build out all aspects of the site.
I championed the use of atomic design systems in this build, a process that was completely new to the Bio agency. Atomic design is a thoughtful, pattern-driven process that considers the fact that designers and developers don’t work in the same way. Devs often work from the ground up - building each asset then combining those assets or ‘atoms’ to create smaller groups or 'molecules', which then join together to form more complex systems of ‘organisms’ which we commonly refer to as 'modules'. These elements can then be repurposed in multitudes of combinations throughout the site. Since introducing this methodology to the team at Bio it's greatly increased our efficiency and workflow.
Photography art direction
I have also art directed the Savills staff and property photography as both of these features are fundamental to portraying the new look and feel of the Savills site.
Continued success
Today, five-years on from the original design, the Savills website design lives on, cementing Savills position as a market leader.