Case study | Black Quadrant

Read more about our approach to solving problems.

1

Understand the problem

Not everything is as it seems.

Zoom Property was a struggling property search engine in Dubai, UAE. They had no point of product differentiation and were operating in a saturated market, which was dominated by regional behemoths like PropertyFinder.ae & Bayut.com. Zoom Property were of the opinion that the cure to their illness was spending more money on marketing.

2

Analyse the problem

Every battle is won before it is fought.

Our business analysts and marketing analysts had several brain storming sessions with various stakeholders like the owner, the admins and the real estate agents in Zoom Property. There seemed to be a consensus among the admins & staff that marketing was the solution.

Our business analysts & product engineers did some digging of their own and figured out that the Zoom Property website had an unusually high bounce rate of 67%. Also, most users did not go past the first 2 pages. The user interface of the portal was pretty good, they had the same listings as their competitors and their digital marketing was just as disciplined.

This led us to believe that User experience, was the real problem. Visitors weren't taking the time to use the portal's features. Several users had even bounced while the portal was loading.

3

Draft the solution

No research without action, no action without research.

Our business analysts, systems architects, solutions architects and the rest of the relevant team members of Black Quadrant came up with a 3 pronged approach to solving user experience woes.

Upgrade existing, outdated product & database architecture to improve performance.
Increase the number of interactive & visual elements on each page to improve user engagement.
Implement an AI, which would personalise the portal based on usage behaviour in real time.

4

Begin development

Build!

The product took 104 days to build and costed roughly $170K. During operation, the solution costs $47 per month for 20 million users. We followed an agile approach to development, which gave Zoom Property access to our work and progress from day 1, instead of having to wait 30 days to feedback. More information about our drafting process can be found by emailing us.

5

Launch & support

It's showtime!

The user experience problem was solved by solving several smaller problems,

Speed. By upgrading their infrastructure and implementing development best practices, Zoom Property's load time went from 3.1 seconds to 780 milliseconds. Even today, it is the fastest property search engine in Dubai, UAE.
Personalisation. By implementing real time machine learning and optimised edge computing, we enabled the portal to morph based on usage patterns of each and every user. This eliminated redundant content, and showcased rich content.
Interactiveness. By personalising content on the fly, users saw more relevant content and interacted more with the portal. Average interactions went from 4 to 27.
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