Clients & users speak:
User Comments:
"I really like the upgrades to WEBForms™ Much more streamlined and faster to use. Things make a lot more sense now and the system is definitely more intuitive."
"Love the new WEBForms!"
“Paul made an effort to understand how the development team worked…”
Overview
The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) is among Canada's largest single-industry trade associations, representing more than 96,000 agents and salespeople. The Association's members use the WEBForms™ web application to support real estate transactions via the use of electronic forms.
Goal
Significantly improve the learnability and effectiveness of WEBForms™ (version 3.3).
Paul's Role
Paul was hired to perform a remote usability review and provide a set of detailed user interface schematics to illustrate suggested user experience improvements.
Challenges
- Users are located across Canada with varied computer skill levels.
- Any changes made to the user interface needed to be made very carefully as not to negatively impact active real estate transactions hosted on the system.
- The WEBForms™ Team also wanted to introduce valuable new features to enhance but not complicate the application.
Approach
- A series of user and workflow study sessions were conducted with both subject matter experts (trainers, Helpdesk personnel, etc.) and REALTORS® from three provinces. All the user study sessions were conducted remotely, using the screen-sharing tool GoToMeeting™.
- An expert usability inspection was conducted on the current user interface of WEBForms™.
- A series of usability recommendations was created and ranked by estimated usability impact, based on the results of the user studies and usability inspection.
- Black and white user interface mock-ups accompanied these recommendations were which were remotely tested with REALTORS® to ensure that the related usability recommendations would produce the desired results.
Results
Results
The release of WEBForms™ 4.0 not only brought a more efficient Real Estate transaction system to REALTORS®, but one that was significantly easier to learn. These changes noticeably reduced Helpdesk calls and produced very positive user feedback. The updated design provided a solid interface design framework making it easier to add additional features in a systematic way.

WEBForms™ 4.0
