2013-2015
LUN is a real estate search engine designed to help people find the best properties in Ukraine and Russia.
The real estate market in Ukraine is not as developed as its neighbors in Europe and the USA. Choosing between different apartments for daily rent, leasing, or purchasing can be a significant challenge. LUN is a search engine aimed at solving this trade-off by aggregating information from different web catalogs into a single feed with reliable descriptions and photos of each apartment.
I was invited to join LUN as a user interface designer. However, after several months, it became apparent that interface work alone was insufficient and that product improvements were necessary.
With my assistance, within a year at LUN, the number of monthly users increased from 20,000 to 200,000. We also added a social project for searching for leasing apartments and a new visual language.
Key objectives at LUN
I highlighted two main goals in the project. The first, contextualized, can be characterized as the generation of traffic in all possible ways. It aimed to change the behavior in searching for apartments via old-school web ads to the brand new search via a search engine. The second objective was usable search. In time, the company’s slogan transformed to “Comfortable real estate search.”
Challenges
01
The most significant challenge was engaging with the post-Soviet markets. Many people are simply unfamiliar with how to use search engines and understand the internet. Accordingly, communication language with the user could not work similarly to its western analogs. Still, I had to adhere to trends.
02
The second challenge was to adopt SEO techniques on each page. Initially, people searched for their apartments via Google and Yandex, and LUN was bypassed because of low link rankings. After optimizing all the pages, LUN hit the top of Google and Yandex results. Today, Ukrainians and Russians are searching for the right apartment via LUN.
03
The third challenge is a wide variety of projects at LUN. It is divided into three separate departments, each of which has a different visitor segment based on solvency and level of awareness in a specific aspect of real estate. I had to divide the functionality into three different projects and adapt them for each type of audience.
Projects and the team behind them
My role
User experience
Working on layouts, I had to empathize with website users. For each project. Every single day.
Visual design & communications
I had to follow guidelines, define and inherit the style, and develop the brand.
Ideation, research, discovery
I needed to analyze competitors' websites and references, and adapt them to Ukrainian realities, thereby generating new ideas.
Sketchbook
LUN projects
01
Each UX of the project is completely unique, so I couldn’t develop a general template for search results or landings.
02
Creating a design for three different projects with separate audiences while inheriting the same guidelines is a complex task.
03
Each page had to be optimized for SEO. This means that every page should be properly linked with another one.
Rent (by day)
Attention Slide
Shows quantitative information about LUN Daily rent search as well as the fully-functional search form.
Functional map
Contains all the information LUN has to search by destinations visually as well as linking all the pages between each other (for SEO).
Popular directions
The intent to design this block is linking with page that contains featured points of interest and search results by this city.
SEO text
I’m against writing SEO text without context, so I proposed dividing the text written by the copywriter into semantic blocks.
Tablet
The map looks slightly different on a map to keep it accessible on touchable devices.
Filters are hidden in the “Filtering” combo box. The most valuable things are shown upfront.
The call to action “Check out available dates” is located right on the most valuable things in the ad – on the image.
The map that shows pins of the items from the listing, and other ads, is hidden above the fold.
SEO text that has to be on every page.
Complex
filtering options
on mobile.
Real Estate
This is the most profitable project of LUN, which works in a way where the data is not aggregated from the real estate websites, but the information catalog is constantly updated instead by the sales team.
Attention slide: Shows a semi-functional search form in the middle and featured links at the bottom.
The intent to design this slide is to provide a paid option for real estate developers to promote their properties.
Linking with popular real estate regions (of course, for SEO).
We developed the LUN Real estate website considering the atomic design system as the main one. It allowed us to build an independent wrapper for each property we promoted.
Rent (Monthly)
This is a service for searching apartments for monthly rent. It works the same way as the daily rent search.
LUN Rent is divided into two sections. The first one is leasing, which people are most interested in; the second one is buying used property.
This is the LUN homepage. It appears when the user enters the lun.ua website. On this slide, we’re showing the company’s slogan. Then the search appears.
As the LUN Real Estate project is the most profitable one, we are linking these blocks to paid properties from other projects.
The mobile version had to show the search on first screen.
LUN.Neighbors
LUN Neighbors was founded for several reasons. Firstly, the Ukrainian Facebook and VK segment is full of calls for help to find an apartment by the desired cost and value, with a limited list of needs and importance. In 90% of cases, people scroll through these calls.
This project appeared to create catchy ads with a generated infographic about the person who wants to rent an apartment by known demands.
01
LUN.Neighbors is my project at LUN. Five people and I developed this project under the art directorship of Denis Sudilkovsky.
02
The project audience includes students and people with low income, active social network users.
03
In about half a year of existence, the service generated over 80,000 infographics.
Introductory slide that shows value proposition.
Still introduction. Now we’re showing the number of users that have used Neighbors. Also, CTAs are located on this slide.
Interest. We are explaining how it works.
Action. All the CTA’s to register.
We developed the instructions to help people understand how to create an infographic.
Then the visitor has to fill all the required fields.
Social step. To make this infographic promoted, the user should post it on his social profile.
Real ads
Discoveries, insights
01
The best explanation of the development process is “Imagine that your mom is using your site.” It’s the kind of empathy I used to develop the LUN website.
02
The bigger the number of links on the website, the better Google and Yandex rankings are.
03
The map helps users understand the context of search results, but it shouldn’t act as a centric point. People read text better.
04
Price is the most important point. All other parameters go after the price.
05
People stick to the subway stations, and they are less interested in a specific district.
06
There are a lot of scammers disguised as realtors. First, they try to entice prepayments and then they disappear.
07
In Ukraine, realtors are evil, who deceive and withdraw double the price of the apartment.
08
The non-intermediary filter used to be popular. To produce trust for a real estate developer, you need to be 100% honest and fill the page properly, giving maximum information and proof of its honesty.
09
Ukrainians aged 40+ find it hard to perceive the user interface. If you want to create a successful website for all ages, you need to explain each part that may confuse your user.
LUN became the default search for all visitors, and the phrase “Google it” transformed into “Search on LUN.”
Press
Forbes
Pravda
Vlasti
Finance.Bigmir
AIN
Glavnoe
Korrespondent
Nashkiev
Businessviews
EST
Interfax
