Savills

The BIO Agency / Design Director
January 2017 - November 2017

Redesigning Savills’ Global Property Search Platform

In 2017, I led the redesign of Savills’ global property website - part of a broader five-year service strategy to modernise the company’s digital offering.

Savills operates across more than 700 offices worldwide. The brief was to strengthen its position as a market leader by rethinking how customers search, explore and engage with property online.

Leading the transformation

I led the end-to-end redesign, overseeing UX and product design across the rebuild.

This involved:

  • Leading a team of UX and product designers

  • Working closely with Savills’ in-house development team

  • Aligning with BIO engineers to deliver the new platform

The goal was to move beyond brochure-style real estate listings and create a more intelligent, user-led search experience.

Rethinking property search

The new platform introduced:

  • Predictive search

  • Region-based browsing

  • Draw-to-search map functionality

  • Collaborative search features

These capabilities shifted the experience from static listings to a more exploratory, user-controlled journey.

The work required balancing high-volume property data, complex filters and performance constraints - while maintaining clarity and visual restraint.

Introducing system-led delivery

To support scalability, I championed a component-led approach grounded in Atomic Design principles - a methodology new to BIO at the time.

By aligning design and development around shared “atoms”, “molecules” and “organisms”, we established a structured toolkit that improved collaboration and reduced duplication.

The approach enabled modules to be reused and recombined across the site, increasing efficiency and consistency as the platform evolved.

Art direction

Alongside the digital platform work, I art directed staff and property photography - ensuring imagery reinforced the new visual language and supported the premium positioning of the Savills brand.

Lasting impact

The redesigned platform became the foundation of Savills’ digital strategy.

In 2025, eight years after the original launch, I returned to lead the next phase of modernisation - evolving the search experience and underlying system to meet new business and performance demands.

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