Case Study : UX and Product Design for a Commercial Real Estate Platform

The team at Rio Property – operators of Spacelink, a commercial real estate platform for brokers based in Cape Town, South Africa – approached me with a clear sense of what they wanted to offer their clients, but no clear picture of how to design it. My role was to take those ideas from concept to something tangible and ready for a development team to build from. Rio Property brought me in on two separate occasions, each with a similar brief.

Project One: A Property Valuation Tool

The first project was a Desktop Valuation tool that would allow property owners to estimate their property's value online – a feature that wasn't widely available to the public, and a meaningful differentiator for the business. The brief centered on three things: make the tool intuitive, make it responsive across desktop and mobile, and make it feel like Spacelink. Through user research into calculator interfaces and how to effectively showcase numerical data, I explored how to present complex inputs in a way that felt approachable vs. clinical. I built out the screens in Figma, working closely with the development team to introduce new visual elements while keeping the experience consistent with the rest of the platform.

Project Two: A Shortlisting System

The second project tackled a more complex interaction design challenge: how to create two different platform experiences (one for brokers managing listings, one for clients evaluating properties) while maintaining a coherent relationship between both flows. The client-side experience also required a means for leaving feedback, which introduced a series of variable flows into the design. The central design problem was managing that complexity without losing clarity for the end user.

The project concluded with 30+ screens, a set of new global component designs, including pop-up modals, indicator pills, and feedback selectors, and a full component library handed off to the development team.

These two projects reflect a design process rooted in research, close collaboration with developers, and a focus on the user's actual goal at every decision point. I would love to work on a similar project in the future.