Knight Frank

Redesigning Digital Residential Services for a Property Powerhouse.

From a fit-for-function portal to a true extension of the Knight Frank brand.

Engagement

2019 - Present

The Challenge

Founded in London in 1896, Knight Frank is one of the world’s leading independent real estate agencies, with an international footprint spanning 51 territories across the globe.

As a brand of such scale and stature in the industry, Knight Frank’s pursuit of digital excellence ensures their leading role in what is often thought to be quite a stayed sector in terms of innovation.

To those ends, Knight Frank partnered with MOF to reinvigorate the client experience — an outcome demanding smart design thinking, innovation, tech and taking a heritage brand on a journey internally to show them a more fruitful future.

A Pioneering Platform for Luxury Property

Knight Frank approached us to redesign their most important client touch point: a complex residential portal enabling buyers and sellers, as well as landlords and tenants to manage their property ‘journeys’ — playing a key role in simplifying the complex and sometimes stressful tasks associated with property sales and lettings.

Knight Frank strives to be pioneers of the luxury property experience by continuously reimagining what buying and selling could be with the right ideas. With this in mind, optimisation for different client journeys alone wasn’t going to be enough, we needed to bring fresh ideas and a design language that was modern but befitting of a cherished heritage brand.

Infusing Joy Back into the Experience

As the top priority, the portal experience needed to be intuitive and straightforward to use. Our UX team conceived a concept early on to refine a ‘Buyer’s Timeline’ page, a key part of the portal to ensure clients know exactly where they are in the process, what comes next and how close they are to completion.

Modernising the design language was also paramount. The old portal's ‘look and feel’ felt functional and boring, resulting in an uninspiring experience that wasn’t inviting and dated the brand.

Matter Of Form developed a new concept and creative direction for the digital experience which was subtle and elegant, building on Knight Frank’s positioning as a traditional and established business.

Due to launch in May 2023, the new portal is a representation of a great collaborative project — one that was rapid but will make a marked difference in the brand experience, with a design language and UX systems that can be transformative elsewhere in the business too.