The beginning: Reimagining and redesigning our CRM & introducing myTRIBUS
myTRIBUS is our latest platform that revamps our suite of real estate tools and consolidates them into a singular, powerful web application. Our team spent many months (and will continue to do so!) crafting a new, thorough experience that makes brokerages’ day-to-days operations easier. I’m quite proud of the work the team has done to get it to this point, but there is a constant evolving dynamic to the process that is also very exciting. I’ll give you a peek into that very process, where our team takes on feedback and identifies aspects of myTRIBUS that we all want to continually improve around the “fashion is never finished” mantra . It’s that type of mentality that serves us well towards making the most engaging real estate tools the industry can offer.
When I first arrived at TRIBUS nearly 5 years ago, we had launched a CRM and Real Estate Intranet with a treasure trove of trackable data.
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Overt flat design was all the rage during that time period and designing screens for large swaths of data was not the design team’s strongest suit up to that point. The design team aimed to keep it simple and incorporate a semblance of a brand stamp that we were actually developing around the same time. We really tried to take elements of successful spreadsheet-like software and make it our own. We experimented with activity timelines and card layouts, but it seemed a bit disjointed from a design perspective. The first initial versions had some really great ideas, but as you’ve seen, it’s safe to say a refresh was always on the cards.
And after a couple years of its implementation and a lot of feedback of what did and did not work, we were in a great position to reimagine what the future of the product might hold. Fast forward to early 2018, reimagining was an understatement of what we had in store for the coming months. We identified profile pages, specifically users, contacts & properties as an area where we could really harness the power of our data and give brokerages the ability to organize themselves well. It wasn’t really surprising as we had learned from our custom real estate website process, that brokerages keyed in on these types of pages in redesigned and we centered that process around a lot of the details pages which you can reference in the RE/MAX Results redesign. And so it goes, we started incorporating a lot of widgets from our dashboard into profiles, with a distinctly new design direction.
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The screens were now getting a bit more complex and really finding a balance to show different types of data and making it easily digestible was a big challenge. We stuck to a card layout, which lends itself to mobile layouts and simplified the color palette so when we actually did use it, it would stick out more and the ever-growing list in areas like the activity stream and actionable buttons.
As we moved forward, it was becoming clear that the team was convinced we were moving in a positive direction. Ultimately if it were to succeed, how it translated to the dashboard, which is one of the first things users see when they open the news version of the app, would be crucial. The good news was once we got the ball rolling, it snowballed and seems to almost create itself sometimes. The ideation process was becoming very fun at this point, as we started seeing the general framework of what the entire system would look like. It started filling in more holes than we expected. There was a deeply rooted interest into making the dashboard a hub of relevant tasks that would encourage you to check in daily for recent updates in a really quick, easy and enjoyable way. And what it ultimately meant was conversational subtleties.
For example, something as simple as seeing a greeting message with the user’s name helped fit the theme of our design goals. It’s this idea of conversational personality that we endeavored to add in places that made sense. You really get a feel for it with some of our latest screens where in many cases, when presented with a plethora of choices in front of you, we guide you through the process in a n unassertive way. We as a team, personally and professionally have dealt with a lot of cases in the world of software that felt over-bearing and made it a point to avoid that feeling.
We’ve come a long way. And we’re still aiming to take it to the next level.
We taken but a small glimpse of what we’ve accomplished here, but over the course of the next posts we’ll dive deeper into every single detail and facet of this latest journey we’ve put ourselves on. In the mean time learn more about our real estate brokerage CRM and experience some exciting times ahead here at TRIBUS.
