Role: Creative Director, Design Direction, Head of Design
Year: 2019 to 2022
Client: Enterprise, Home Sales, Homebuilding
Industry: New Homes, Real Estate
Team
Skills

NewHomeSource Builders Showcase

Redesigning how home builders prove their credibility to first-time new-home shoppers

Overview

The NewHomeSource Builders Showcase is the section of the NewHomeSource site where individual home builders present their credibility, communities and homes to shoppers.¹ My team at Rocksauce Studios redesigned it for BDX / NewHomeSource, restructuring the page into subpages and rebuilding its emphasis around search and visual proof (map, gallery, video, 3D tours) for a shopper who may never have heard of the builder.¹⁴ A companion product in the same BDX family, HomLuv, is a deeper study on this site.⁵ [NEEDS Q: Rocksauce or EX Squared? The case study is Rocksauce-branded and credits a Rocksauce UX designer,¹⁰ but it also says BDX was already Rocksauce's parent, and related ticket work in the shared files runs to May 2022.¹¹]

Problem

The builder section was outdated and hard to use at a moment when the pandemic had pushed home shopping online, and buyers expected the visual depth of walking a model home in person: photos, video, 3D tours.¹ For the builder, the goal was credibility: prove years in the business, show awards and accreditations, surface favorable reviews.² For the shopper, often a first-time buyer sizing up an unfamiliar builder, the goal was orientation: find homes by builder, area, room or exterior, and judge a community alongside the house itself.¹² A UX designer on my team put the business goal plainly: "selling homes, the product itself is in the industry of promoting these builders' homes."²

Solution

We made the map the hero. The redesigned builder page opens on a map of the builder's communities, with Gallery, Video and 3D Tours one tap away in the same space rather than buried further down.⁴ Below it sits the builder header: logo, a community finder by area, a link to the builder's own site, a TrustBuilder review count, and tabs for About, Reviews, Gallery, Locations and FAQs.⁷ The builder shown throughout, Ashton Woods, is sample content in the mock-ups; its names, review counts and prices are not live figures.⁷

The work was done inside a responsive framework rather than a fixed desktop layout retrofitted for phones, and the team carried those patterns into the rest of the site.³ Every state was drawn at 320 wide as well as desktop.⁷

The page hierarchy was rebuilt into sections a shopper can jump between.¹ Featured communities come first, each with its address, starting price, a community photo and a row of plans with prices, plus direct actions to get directions, call or text the builder, or view all homes.⁷

Credibility gets its own section, which is what the builder came for: an About block, then Awards & Accreditations as cards.² The award cards in the mock-up are lorem ipsum placeholders.⁷

The gallery filters by room and media type (kitchens, bathrooms, living spaces, bedrooms, exteriors, plans, videos, 3D tour), which is the "search by room or by house exterior" the case study describes.¹⁷

FAQs and an "Ask" band close the loop for a shopper with a question, and reviews are summarized from TrustBuilder with a star breakdown and ratings by category.⁷ Research leaned on competitive analysis and, weighted more heavily by the team's own account, on observed behavior on the live site, used to decide what to keep, cut or revise.⁶

Design work for the surrounding site sits across five related Figma folders: NHS UX (36 files), NHS UI (27), NHSX UX (10), NHSX UI (11) and BDXLive (6).⁸ Frames there dated 2022 (map prototypes, community cards and a Coming Soon split test dated May 2022) are left off this page until the credit is confirmed.¹¹

Outcome

The sourced narrative describes BDX as the parent company of both NewHomeSource and Rocksauce, and frames that as the reason the engagement happened.¹ My own EX Squared case study completes the chain: EX Squared's parent is Builder Homesite, Inc. (BDX), and EX Squared purchased Rocksauce, so BDX was Rocksauce's parent through EX Squared.⁹ [NEEDS Q: did the Builders Showcase work happen before or after the acquisition: client work, or work for the parent?] The same marketing narrative claims the update doubled traffic and doubled average time on page since launch.¹ That is the project's own case-study copy rather than a measured analytics source, so it is reported here as a claim the narrative makes, not a result I measured. [NEEDS Q: is there an analytics source to confirm or correct these figures?]