Project scope

Luxury Presence is a VC-funded Stanford StartX-accelerated startup, building a premium platform to provide real estate agents with stunning websites, world-class marketing tools and services, and access to an exclusive network. Their customers are often found on the Wall Street Journal and Forbes top 100 real estate lists and incudes leading agents and brokers like Compass, Coldwell Banker, re/max, Sotheby's international realty, and many more.

Luxury Presence wanted to remaster their website’s builder design and functionality, which required dramatic changes to both the UI and the underlying legacy React codebase, to enable them to provide the best experience for their clients with the least amount of effort and cognitive load for the users.

This web application is highly interactive and requires high attention to detail and problem solving to handle the complex state management of the tool. The project was not a simple rebranding and required many changes to the UX flow and performance optimizations.

The Creative Challenge

The project had strict requirements. For the Website Builder implementation, the Graphql backend was complete and the FE needed to be implemented with React/Apollo/StyledComponents.

The challenge was also in the massive cohesion the application had in it, leading to a sensible situation in which one change (in the code for example) could possibly disrupt the functionality of another part of the website.

This problem is more challenging in big codebases, like Luxury Presence’s, because the components might have tricky handling of props and two-way data flow that, once changed, might ripple through the app, disrupting some remote parts of it.

The Solution

After visiting their LA office to understand the project requirements, and a series of conversations with their team, Compire concluded that to make a successful and scalable remastering, the required changes had to include a wide array of reusable components that both needed to be remastered and rebuilt from the ground up.

Compire rose up to the challenge and created a well-crafted and careful plan of remastering the platform. Instead of changing all the components and pages at once, a step-by-step process, accompanied by careful testing after every major change, led to a smooth and stable remastering of both the website builder part of the platform and the dashboard of the users.

- The Dashboard has seen one of the biggest changes in the UI of all the parts remastered. A new, brighter and more contrasted UI was implemented, with more intuitive calls to actions and less cognitive load for the user.

- The Flat 2.0 UI strategy was adopted to give the UI a clean, sleek and modern look, fit for the Luxury Presence’s business model and target audience.

After a long and careful stroll through the majority of the components, we managed to pay quite some technical debt and make the application more robust and scalable.

The Results

A successful remastering of the website’s look and feel, as initially planned. The bonus points were the clean code that would allow for an easy and painless further development.

Thanks to a successful collaboration between Luxury Presence and Compire, a deal was struck for another project to be created and realized from the ground up, which further allowed Compire to assist and consult Luxury Presence in website-related issues and goals.