What on earth do car interiors have to do with online multifamily marketing? If you’re even remotely concerned with how customers interact with your community websites and software tools (and really, who isn’t?), understanding product design and development processes in the automobile industry provides some keen insight into how improved user experiences can impact the multifamily resident lifecycle.  

“My favorite word in thinking about user experience and design is empathy,” says former General Motors product designer Branden Neish, who spoke on the Crafting an Interactive User Experience panel at a recent Property Solutions’ user conference. “A lot of auto purchases and leases are made on emotion, and you have to be able to capture customer attention via emotion. To achieve that, the first stop in any design process is really understanding the customer.”

According to Neish, the balancing act of a great user experience is between design constraints, business and development constraints, and engineering constraints, necessitating a partnership between business, design and engineering departments and disciplines.

Similarly, user experience should apply in three key areas in the apartment industry: your leasing office, your model units, and finally your prospect and resident websites. 

In the session, presenters outlined their top five tips for an improved community website user experience:

1)     Cut the Clutter: Use a maximum of 8, clearly labeled navigation items.

2)     Provide Eye Candy: Capture attention by leveraging visual media, most notably, lots of high-quality photography.

3)     Minimize the Mazes: Don’t hold back information in any area. Help users quickly find what they are looking for.

4)     Embrace Brevity: Keep text short and concise. Bullet points are great.

5)     Stay Current: Make sure your overall design is clean and up to date.

Certain online marketing/design features including strategic placement of calls-to-action (CTA’s) and static sidebar navigation (with contact info, location, hours and ratings and reviews) have shown a 38% increase in page views, 78% increase in average visit duration, and 52% increase in online applications.

Even with the depth of advancement we’ve witnessed in consumer and business web technology, Neish proposes that we might still be at the beginning stages of discovering how user experience ultimately impacts technology design. “The internet and software in general are not where they should or could be from a user experience standpoint,” he says. “There is room for incredible growth driven by this core design idea that lies at the intersection of science and art.”