KELLER WILLIAMS

Manager of Product Design

We were working with an outdated product, fragmented across platforms, and hindered by siloed mobile and web teams. The design system was very much in it's early days.


To stay competitive, we needed more than a visual refresh — we needed a complete design transformation.

Our goal was twofold: attract more leads for agents and accelerate the homebuying process for users. That meant rethinking the user experience from the ground up and aligning cross-platform efforts under a unified, scalable design system.


I led the charge to modernize the product, streamline collaboration between teams, and build a design foundation capable of driving both user trust and business growth.


I bucket my work into 2 main sections:


  1. Internal Improvements (Team, Process, Tooling,)

  2. Design Enhanencements (New design system, product features and adjustments)

MY INITIATIVES

UX and UI Overhaul
New Design System
A Redesigned Homepage
ADA Audit
Design Process Enhancements
New ios and Android Apps
A Compare Home Experience
Redesigned Property Page

UX and UI Overhaul

I led a comprehensive UX/UI overhaul to modernize and streamline our core product experience. Through cross-functional collaboration, user research, and design system improvements, we delivered a more intuitive and scalable interface. The redesign resulted in increased user engagement, faster task completion, and a stronger design foundation for future growth.

Working with Real Estate Agents

Keller Williams has over 170,000 Real Estate Agents and we wanted to make them all happy

We devised a few methods for keeping close to our agents and making sure were listening to them to help us discover ideas, problems and opportunities. This included:


• Tech booths and feedback workshops at our conferences - Mega Agent Camp and Family Reunion


• A beta group of agents that we could access whenever we needed to


• Field Days at local brokerages where designers would shadow agents at open houses and throughout their day.

We designed our openhouse app with many rounds of feedback from various real estate agents

Updates to App

I helped lead the rebuild our Experience Design System across all digital platforms KW.com, and our mobile apps. Working closely with our design system specialists, I led efforts to modernize visual styles, enhance accessibility, and create a flexible component library. This large-scale initiative required tight collaboration with designers, product teams, marketing, and executives to drive alignment and deliver a cohesive, scalable system.

Updates to our Web Product

Leaning into our super power: Real Estate Agents

I think it's always critical for a company to lean into their superpower. And ours is our real estate agents. We made a concerted effort through copy adjustments to bring agents and their impact more into the user's mind. Tiny steps like these are cheap to do, but can have large impacts

Adjustments included new copy that brought the agent into the picture, a more robust search experience that included finding an agent and a new photography style that focused on the reasons to purchase a home

A New Design System

I helped lead the rebuild our Experience Design System across all digital platforms KW.com, and our mobile apps. Working closely with our design system specialists, I led efforts to modernize visual styles, enhance accessibility, and create a flexible component library. This large-scale initiative required tight collaboration with designers, product teams, marketing, and executives to drive alignment and deliver a cohesive, scalable system.

ADA Audit

I led the design side on a major project to bring our existing site and future designs up to ADA standards. This was a major undertaking as it required action from PMs, Lawyers, Engineers and Designers. We found over 1000 issues that needed to be addressed to make our product compliant and after going through the process of fixing our violations - I came up with checklists, trainings, delivery and testing guidelines to make sure the new features we were building were compliant and inclusive.

Empowering Designers

As a manager it’s my job to empower designers to create and contribute their own ideas. At KW, I focused on creating a space for our team to explore possibilities and generate metric moving innovating solutions! I love when designers schedule adhoc meetings with suggestions and ideas. That's a sign of an engaged employee!


Some key outcomes that came from this were: 

  • A redesigned property page that did a better job aligning with homebuyers expectations and encouraged an agent/buyer relationship

  • An open house app that could easily collect new leads.

  • A new photo style and approach to roll it out to 200,000 agents


My recipe for success involved many different focuses:

• Allowing them a large area of focus when looking for solutions. Instead of constricting my designers and PMs to one page, we made sure they were focused on the entire user journey. 

• Encouraging them to constantly review and share great products that they have seen in the field. Our weekly meetings have a special time reserved for this sort of activity and it always leads to inspiration.

• Implementing structured brainstorming sessions and helping them craft and lead workshops with a wide variety of stakeholders. We built a very collaborative environment at Keller Williams by making sure our workshops were creative, fun and solution oriented. 

Ben Pepin | Product Design Leader

ben.a.pepin@gmail.com

Ben Pepin | Product Design Leader

ben.a.pepin@gmail.com