My REMAX Ultimate 2.0
My REMAX Ultimate is a comprehensive in-house portal designed from the ground up to be as easy to navigate as possible for the agents working for the company. Every page was designed to be easy for someone with very little tech literacy to find their way around.
Role
User Research
UX Design
UI Design
Graphic Design
Project Management
Tools
Wix Studio
Adobe Illustrator
The Problem
In early 2025, REMAX Head Office announced an exciting new rebrand for the worldwide market, with bold new colours, a sharp new logo, and a fresh spin on their iconic balloon. The marketing team realized that our original site - while hot off the press - was heavily designed around the new brand and we would need to refresh it if we wanted to keep our brokerage up-to-date.
My Solution
Design a portal using Wix Studio that will clearly communicate to agents all of the important information they need to know about their brokerage, especially the new brand. Since agents have gotten used to the old site, we used this opportunity to streamline while still keeping things familiar. An integrated AI chatbot assists with navigation and finding outside resources.
Research
Much of the research for this new round of portal design was similar to the research done for the initial site, so I'll keep this content the same. However, one additional hurdle this time around was designing a better navigation interface - in this case, a sidebar, which is a suprisingly tall order on Wix Studio. While revisiting the REMAX Agent hubs I also took a chance to look at company portals on Behance to see how best to organize the information, as well as got in contact with the lead designer at Wix Studio to ask them how best I could tackle these challenges in their new design environment.
Excerpt from My REMAX Ultimate Portal 1.0: At the start of the project I took the chance to familiarize myself with the resources the agents currently had access to, as well as how easily they could access the ones most important to them; agents at the brokerage had expressed they wanted easy access to legal documents, social media templates, and print marketing. Upon accessing the official REMAX Agent Broker Hub I realized many of these resources were either nonexistent or extremely hard to access - print marketing was two pages deep + another two redirects to other, outside websites like Staples. A hub for our brokerage would need to be easier to use.
Above: REMAX Agent Hub Home Page | Resources Page | Sign Supplier Redirect
User Testing
The user testing we had done on the previous portal was really valuable and let us know about a lot of possible pain points the agents were going to have navigating the site. Unfortunately - as mentioned in the last case study - I only had the opportunity to implement bandaid solutions to a lot of these woes. This new site gave us the opportunity to implement these fixes more organically. Once the new site was published we did two rounds of agent testing on a demo site, with a form they could fill out to let us know about new pain points. I've listed a few below, though there were significantly fewer than before.
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A few buttons and cards that were self-explanatory to us weren't for the agents.
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Solution: pop-up explanations on hover, or lightbox windows with more context
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Booking page was unclear about the nature of the meetings (in-person, Zoom, etc)
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Solution: create separate booking links for in-person or online meetings, with instructions for how to book and join a meeting
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The agent training "4-Week Fast Track" checklist was too vague without the context we had
Solution: Each step of the fast track was expanded, with more specific information about points of contact and who to talk to about what steps.
Key Takeaways
This whole design process was an important reminder to me that the user does not have the same information the designer does. There was a lot I assumed I could be more succinct about based on the idea that my design would mean something to everyone, but the confusion made me realize there needed to be a lot more explicit explanations about how things worked and where buttons were going - something as simple as a logo button redirecting to a site isn't simple anymore when the user doesn't even recognize the logo of a site they use all the time.
Design System
Left: MyRemaxUltimate Design System Breakdown, two pages
Bold Blue Buttons
Big blue buttons across the site make it easy for users to differentiate what is a button and what isn't. The blue is also the official REMAX Rebrand Blue so as to maintain recognizable brand consistency. This rounded blue style is used for almost every major & minor button on the site.
Large Cards
For important content like templates, events & news posts I used large cards with text and images that summarize the content if clicked to prevent confusion. There are also small expand animations to make it more obvious on-hover that they're clickable.
REMAX Navy Sidebar
The sidebar is the only place on the site that agents will see the REMAX Dark Navy. This makes it stand out in their browser windows, and ensures the easy to use navigation is never drowned out by other content.
Bright Red Chat Button
By request, an AI chatbot was implemented on the site and is used to help direct agents who may be having difficulty finding certain content - significant requests will help us know where the site could be revised in the future. The bright red - used almost exclusively here - makes the button stand out.
Final Thoughts
Working on this site was a treat after the breakneck speed that the last portal had to be made at; where that had to be done in a few weeks, this site was refined and changed over the course of about three and a half months, May to August with a vacation in between. Every function we had added later on the last site - event calendars, online learning, and meeting bookings - was included from the beginning here and integrated much more naturally, alongside new features like the chat bot, our orientation checklists, and our brokerage Canva templates.
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Similarly, having more time for user-testing this time around gave us a good opportunity to make small changes as we went, and taught me a lot about assumed knowledge and how my urge to streamline everything and cut fluff isn't always the best course of action.
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The best part about making this site by far was the opportunity to utilize the Wix Studio Creator, which allowed the site to be a lot more advanced in its functionality, as well as significantly more responsive than we could make it in the previous versions of Wix. A significant amount of my time spent on this site was making every simgle page accessible at all major breakpoints, as well as at extra-large sizes. This wasn't as possible before and it was very exciting not being limited by an arbitrary site width.