Overview

MAA (Mid-America Apartments) is the largest owner-operator of apartment homes in North America. They came to Huge asking for a website redesign project that will reflect their brand and create a easy and memorable experience for the User. 

The scope of this project included features such as a global open type search box, property search map, and amenities filtering option. We wanted to create a more intuitive and flattened structure for the website and a combination of Huge’s recommendation and MAA’s internal requirements informed the new sitemap.

City Landing Page as Homepage

SEO revealed that users found the maac.com site most often from organic search by typing ‘apartments in {location}’. Thus, the City Landing Page was most often the first page they accessed maac.com by users and was the de facto ‘Homepage’ of maac.com.

Seperate Pages for Neighborhoods and Secondary Cities

We decided to build individual pages for suburban cities and most common neighborhoods as well to capture the most common organic search.

To create a seamless user experience, while the backend and URL changed to load a new page for each location, the front end user experience was designed to feel as though it was a filter.

2. Design for Users in Different Stages of their Apartment Search Journeys

Overall, we discovered there were two phases in the user journey in which the user came to the maac.com website: Users who knew exactly which property they wanted and users who were still in the exploratory phase.

Provide Easily Digestible Snackable Content 

For the user who knew exactly which property they wanted, we put great attention in the Property Detail Page.  The four tab structure and content was consolidated into a single page. Providing easily digestible ‘snackable content’ that represented not only the community but the surrounding areas as well was a priority so that the users could get clear bullet points on the character of the community.

 
Answer the Un-voiced Desire

For the undecided user, we designed the pages to speak to the users’ unspoken desires and needs. When given a variety of selection of similar properties, what drives a user to make a decision? We wanted to explicitly give voice to the users’ lifestyle desire. ‘Who do I see myself as? Is my living situation indicative of the lifestyle I want to live?’ These are the unconscious questions that goes through everyone’s mind when searching for an apartment and we wanted to call out and answer that to help the user in their search for the perfect apartment. This is where the idea to organize communities around ‘lifestyle’ emerged.

3. Create a Consistent Experience for Different Data Sets

MAA owns a wide variety of properties from studios to townhomes situated in different locations with varying amounts of vacancies. Creating a flexible system that takes into account the many different scenarios of their properties while providing a consistent front end experience for the user was a primary consideration.

Providing the user a way to quickly scan and filter necessary information to help them avoid decision fatigue was also a priority when making decisions around how to display the various data related to each property and units.

Team

Mimi Kim

Digital & Spatial Designer