(Project executed as Box – a collaboration between Quicksand & Codesign)

The Vatika Group is a large business house in North India with diversified interests that range from residential, commercial and retail real estate to business centers, hospitality (hotels & restaurants) and education.

The top management of Vatika wanted to completely re-examine what their corporate website should be and how it should, most effectively, cater to the needs of the various stakeholders in the ecosystem. These stakeholders mapped against various internal departments were:

• For Real Estate
  • End users for residential real estate
  • Banks that sanction housing loans
  • Real estate brokerage firms,
  • Teams at retail chains responsible for identifying locations for expansion
  • Facilities management teams at corporate clients responsible for selecting
  • Organizations looking to hire Vatika’s Facilities Management Services for their premises

• For Hospitality
  • Potential guests to their hotels
  • Visitors to their restaurants

• Education
  • Parents of prospective students
  • People in the education fraternity

Vatika engaged Quicksand in a user-centered web design project for their corporate website. The project lasted about 3 months from research to website go-live and consisted of the following phases:

1. User Research: In discussions with Vatika’s top management, we identified a comprehensive set of stakeholders , within and outside of Vatika, who needed to be part of the user research. These included end users of residential real estate, people within the Vatika sales, marketing & finance teams, people at corporate houses who were clients of Vatika’s office space, people who were visitors to hotels and restaurants.

We visited these different stakeholders and had extensive conversations on their interactions with a real estate website, the jobs they needed to get done and brainstormed features on the website that could help them get those jobs done more effectively.

2. Synthesized User Needs: We synthesized user needs into proposed features and had an immersive workshop with the entire top management of Vatika and heads of different functions. We presented our research and also the feature set abstracted from those user needs. At the end of this discussion, we’d created a features roadmap for the corporate website.

3. Prototypes: We created high-fidelity wireframes bases on the features roadmap and then finalized those in workshops with the Vatika team.

4. Brand Definition: We facilitated 2 workshops with Vatika management and key people in which we arrived at a visual understanding of what the Vatika brand represented. The participants were primed with several images / cards / websites and asked to respond whether and how that image represented the Vatika brand. We distilled the brand into a few key adjectives that were taken as key inputs into the visual design.

5. Visual Design: Our design team created the visual design for the website based on the brand definition and guided the web development working closely with the technology team at Vatika.