Otto House
Otto House is a boutique real estate brand focused on high-standard residential properties in Southern Brazil. With a portfolio of curated houses and apartments, the company blends digital discovery with a highly personalized offline service.
The website is the brand’s primary communication and conversion channel used not only to attract qualified buyers but also to reinforce the company’s architectural sensibility, design-first positioning, and differentiated portfolio.
Digital Showcase for Premium Real Estate
Otto House operates in a segment where trust, aesthetics, and emotional connection are essential. The digital experience had to reflect the refinement of its portfolio and the expertise of its curators, not just listing properties, but telling stories and enabling desire.
The platform redesign had a dual purpose: optimize lead generation through performance and SEO, while reinforcing a minimalist, human-centered narrative aligned with the brand’s voice.
Context
The original website had limitations in visual consistency, mobile performance, and content flexibility. Pages were built with rigid templates, resulting in poor storytelling for premium properties and high dependency on manual interventions to publish content.
Beyond that, the user journey lacked intuitive entry points for browsing, filtering, or contacting the team, which created friction in moments of decision.
My Role
I led the redesign of the website experience, structuring the interface and visual language to match both functional and emotional expectations of the target audience. My responsibilities included was:
- Reimagining layout structure for hero properties, portfolio pages, and listing filters
- Creating a CMS-integrated component system for dynamic publishing
- Enhancing mobile experience with clear navigation, reduced visual clutter, and fast-loading assets
- Supporting brand evolution through typographic and tonal refinements
Key Challenges
- Translating architectural refinement and exclusivity into web experience without overloading visual elements
- Balancing aesthetics and SEO performance in a content-driven platform
- Designing a flexible layout system that could support editorial content, listings, and conversion flows simultaneously
Certainties, Suppositions and Doubts
What guided early decisions
We knew Otto House needed to convey trust, curation, and exclusivity from the first click. Its strong visual identity and mobile-first usage were non-negotiables. We assumed editorial navigation would feel more premium, and that fewer, curated listings would boost engagement.
What we didn’t know: would users miss filters? Which elements truly built digital trust, visuals, tone, or proof? This clarity shaped both research and design focus.
Hypothesis Mapping and Prioritization
From gut feeling to structured experimentation
I transformed the assumptions into testable hypotheses, such as:
- Editorial-style browsing increases engagement.
- Featuring fewer, curated properties boosts conversion.
- Microinteractions enhance the perception of sophistication.
Each hypothesis was scored for impact and test effort, creating a clear roadmap of what to validate first, focusing on high-impact, low-effort insights to guide design.
User Research and Interviews
Validating patterns through qualitative conversations
I ran structured user testing with synthetic personas reflecting Otto House’s audience, design-sensitive, detail-driven, and lifestyle-oriented. We explored how users perceived trust, value, clarity, and interaction. Key takeaways:
- A calm, editorial interface builds confidence.
- Curated presentation feels more human than filter overload.
- Contact options must be instantly accessible on all views.
These insights helped shape both content and UI logic.
Strategic Benchmarking
Understanding the premium real estate digital landscape
I analyzed 12 national and international platforms to map patterns, opportunities, and UX failures in the digital experience of high-end property searches. Sites like QuintoAndar, Sotheby’s, AxPe, and Casas Bacanas helped expose how fragmented the current landscape is, split between performance-oriented logic and brand storytelling.
We uncovered recurring gaps such as the lack of true curatorship, lifestyle-centered filtering, and editorial presentation, all of which became strategic leverage points for Otto House to differentiate.
User-Centered Design Canvas
Designing from behavior, not assumptions
The User-Centered Design Canvas distilled user expectations into actionable design criteria:
- User goals: find properties that reflect identity and trust the brand behind them.
- User tasks: browse easily, access info quickly, contact effortlessly.
- Pain points: cluttered interfaces, lack of emotional resonance, trust gaps.
- Emotional drivers: reinforce elegance and clarity, avoid confusion and generic tone.
This framework guided the UI strategy, from flow to copy.
Structure and Functionality
Turning research into structured experience
Based on the behavioral patterns and emotional cues, I designed the site architecture to:
- Highlight imagery over interface
- Reduce decision friction with clear, shallow navigation
- Simplify filters to prioritize discovery, not overwhelm
- Build property pages that blend rational and emotional content
Every interaction was mapped with a reason, both UX and business-driven.
Approach & Strategy
The strategy focused on combining emotional storytelling with structural clarity:
- Visual language: Adopted a minimalist, modular design with controlled use of whitespace and typographic rhythm to evoke calm and trust.
- Navigation flow: Simplified access to key actions, property search, contact, and curation logic with direct affordances.
- Performance-first mindset: Optimized mobile and desktop load speed by reducing dependencies and structuring assets by priority.
- CMS empowerment: Enabled Otto’s team to publish, curate, and reorder sections without developer support, preserving consistency through components.
Key Learnings
- In premium segments, design is not decoration, it’s a business tool that communicates positioning and filters intent.
- Empowering internal teams with well-structured CMS logic increases agility and editorial quality.
- A real estate platform should behave more like a curated magazine than a marketplace, emphasizing story, space, and detail.
Final Thoughts
Otto House confirmed that design leadership often means translating brand essence into navigable structure, aligning emotion and action within every scroll, click, and content block.
The project evolved the brand’s digital layer from static presence to a living showroom, one that invites, informs, and inspires. By combining strategic UX with refined UI, the new site became not just a source of leads, but an extension of Otto House’s core identity.
