Improving the Customer Experience with Successful Interaction Design
3rd March 2021
How do you stay up to date whilst competing against newer, innovative competitors?
Since 1978 Martin Grant Homes have been building quality homes in the South East. A lot has changed in those 43 years and it’s important to recognise the significance of evolving and adapting to the times. During one of our scheduled review meetings, we discussed the idea of creating an Interactive Siteplan to improve their customer experience.
The old Siteplan was a static image and whilst it served its purpose we wanted to provide users with an intuitive and Interactive Siteplan to assist in finding the right property for them. Interactive Maps aren’t that new, but they serve a very useful purpose in the right context.
We started by undertaking competitor research to see which of Martin Grant Homes competitors were already using Interactive Siteplans. After looking at Interactive Maps across a variety of business sectors, we realised that many people use out of the box solutions.
For Martin Grant Homes, we wanted our Interactive Siteplan to integrate into our custom-built CMS. The goal was to pull through live information and auto-update without the requirement of manual editing.
Through our research, we also discovered that the majority of competitors only had Interactive Siteplans working across desktop devices. It was crucial for us to find a way to create a Siteplan that would work on all devices, as over 80% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices.
Taking onboard our research feedback, we decided to write our own script from scratch. Doing so would allow us to talk to the database and pull through dynamic content. We ended up with a lightweight JavaScript solution, ensuring cross-browser compatibility. We also built-in support for touch screens, allowing the Interactive Siteplan to work across all devices.
The final product is efficient and clean, but we did hit a few snags along the way. One of the more complicated parts came from the requirement to centralise plots based on the page the user was on. A lot of math calculations later, we now centre the plots using the canvas size, the viewport size and the plots relative location to the canvas.
-Lloyd James, Head of Digital
The new Interactive Siteplan provides a much more intuitive and engaging experience, allowing the users to explore and find their very own plot to call home. Since launching the new interactive Siteplan we have seen a number of users engaging with the feature with 11% of users navigating through to selected plots from this asset.
