Apartments.com

Acquia Site Studio in Action

Leveling up the digital design to drive more leads was our goal, and a modern Acquia Site Studio deployment was the best way to help the marketing team with component management and layout control.

However, admins can quickly be overburdened with too many component options. Likewise, overengineering a site to account for every layout possibility can result in a watered-down design experience.

We had to strike a balance between impactful design, content management, and technical performance to deliver an effective digital experience that would ultimately drive leads.

Drupalizing Design

CoStar came with the majority of the newly completed page designs for Grow, but as anyone who has built sites at scale knows, there is a gap between what a Figma file shows and what the admin UI of a Drupal site will ultimately look like. We call this process “Drupalizing” designs.

This collaborative effort between our Drupal-centric UX and development teams and CoStar’s designers dug into a proposed design system to figure out how it should work, not just how it should look. Siloing designers from the dev process, especially with Drupal sites, puts a lot of responsibility on developers to guess what content editors want or need to be able to change—which, when there's friction, can lead to bloat, technical debt, or total rework.

Plenty of Room for Delight

Together with the CoStar team, we figured out the possible permutations of content, how components needed to scale and adapt visually across devices, and ultimately how editable, optional, moveable, or removable each piece of content needed to be.

The “happy medium” struck between flexibility, consistency, and complexity for the Grow site enables the Apartments.com team to market more and content manage less. And with interactive media and motion in play, a constant concern was performance across devices. We had to deliver larger assets in a smart way to avoid a sluggish experience.

Outcome

The new design system provided a visually appealing, user-friendly experience that improved lead generation and supported CoStar's advertising business. The collaboration between Elevated Third’s Drupal UX and development teams and CoStar’s designers ensured a balance between design and performance.

Elevated Third's frequent and open communication was key to the success of the project, considering the complexity and richness of the designs.Paul Stadnyk, Creative Director, CoStar