Case Study 3
A Bespoke Homebuyer Portal Experience
CLIENT: Pahlisch | ROLE: Creative Director & Senior UX/UI Product Design Advisor | AGENCY: Emerge Interactive
Challenge:
One of the final projects I lead during my time at Emerge Interactive involved a client in the residential home construction and community home building space – Pahlisch Homes. Their desire was to build a customer portal experience that would allow homebuyers to view and track the progress of their new home construction. This portal would also include features such as sending and receiving messages from the Pahlisch team & general contractors, access and alerts to critical and essential documents, and eventually offer a unique 3D customization experience to allow homebuyers to become a bigger part of the home designing experience themselves. It was their hope that building such an experience would help to modernize their business and attract new customers.
Our primary challenge was that Pahlisch was still in talks with several 3rd party companies to adapt and utilize specialized 3D modeling software to achieve the 3D customization experience feature before Emerge came along. These talks ultimately lasted longer than the project scope.
goal:
The mutually agreed upon goal was to create a premium experience for homebuyers with helpful and assistive functionality, ensure the experience could accommodate an eventual and phased in 3D custom design feature, and that a high degree of empathy and emotional consideration was baked into the final product.
The rationale for this last aspect is quite simple — a home is a very large financial and emotional investment, especially when considering new construction. Managing customers’ emotions and ensuring their peace of mind was paramount and a very reasonable success metric that Pahlisch held for this project.
Salesforce integration was also a requirement, as the platform would be part of Pahlisch’s sales pipeline and thus need to accurately reflect sales data in real-time.
PROCESS:
In partnering with Emerge, the agency product team was assembled consisting of myself as acting Creative Director and Senior UX/UI Product Design Advisor, a dedicated UX Designer, a dedicated UI Designer, a Project Manager, and Solutions Architect Lead.
The engagement with Pahlisch started by visiting their beautifully constructed headquarters in Bend, Oregon for a project kick-off which included an empathy mapping and service blueprinting session to ensure each step of their customer’s journey was understood from both an emotional perspective as well as a business perspective. Service blueprinting allowed the Pahlisch team to chart each customer step as well as identify what lay beyond the ‘line of visibility’, i.e. the backstage people and actions, tools and processes, and support mechanisms that meet their customer at each step they take in their homebuying journey.
Following this kick-off and working session, the Emerge team set out to create user flows and information architecture, which included critical sequences such as onboarding:
Pahlisch as a client was not as technically savvy or as quick to respond and provide feedback as other clients Emerge had worked with in the past, so our team utilized an agile workflow internally to keep progress moving on our end while keeping to a more traditional review cycle with the client to showcase the platform’s evolution.
In time, we made a lot of great progress and the client was pleased with the work Emerge was producing. As my design role was more advisory in nature, I worked closely with the team UX and UI designers to brainstorm ideas, work through design challenges, and offer support as necessary. This project ultimately concluded beyond my time at Emerge as I was laid off at the end of October of 2023 due to a lack of new client work, but I kept in touch with my former team designers to offer mentorship support.
Both of them would be happy to provide references:
Caden Williams – UX Product Designer
cadenwilliams3@gmail.com
Clara Munro – UI Product Designer
clarajmunro@gmail.com
The Emerge product team utilized Miro for empathy mapping and service blueprinting, and Figma for low and high fidelity wireframes, prototypes, and user interface design.
OUTCOMES:
Working with a client that had a more basic level of technical proficiency can be challenging at times, but is uniquely rewarding and satisfying in that you really help them move the needle with the work that you perform. In this case, Pahlisch was extremely pleased with the work performed and the amount of empathy we introduced into both the design process and product itself. This work made such an impact that when Emerge laid off the rest of its full-time staff in June of 2024, Caden went on to continue performing work for Pahlisch directly as a UX and UI designer in a freelance capacity with Emerge’s full support.
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