Case study 01 · Bright MLS · Shipped

Simplifying real‑estate search for a multi‑state MLS

Bright MLS is one of the largest multiple listing services in the U.S., serving 100,000+ real‑estate professionals and 250,000+ transactions annually across nine states and Washington, D.C. As Lead Product Designer, I helped it evolve from a data provider into a product organization — introducing a repeatable UX practice, validating new product concepts, and unifying five platforms under one design system.

Role Lead Product Designer

Organization Bright MLS — enterprise real-estate platform

Scope UX strategy · research · design system · new products

Collaborators Product, engineering, marketing, and external vendors

Summary

The problem: shifting priorities, little UX structure, and a platform mid‑migration from 2.0 to 3.0, serving professionals whose livelihood depends on it. My contribution: end‑to‑end product design — research, information architecture, a shared design system, and the design of new products from concept through go‑to‑market. The result: a structured, measurable UX practice; five platforms under shared standards; validated premium product concepts; and a redesigned core experience.

Redesigned Bright MLS surfaces across search, listings, and the dashboard — Fig. 01Where the work landed: redesigned Bright MLS surfaces across search, listings, and the dashboard.

Context & challenge

A platform professionals depend on, without a design practice to match

The year started with unclear processes and very little UX structure. Agents, brokers, and appraisers relied on Bright daily — to list, search, and close — but the experience had grown fragmented across products, and design decisions had no repeatable path from evidence to shipped work.

I began where the confusion was most visible: the information architecture. Mapping the existing homepage exposed duplication and dead ends, and gave the organization a shared picture of the problem.

Sitemap of the existing Bright MLS homepage — Fig. 02First artifact of the engagement: mapping the existing homepage's information architecture to expose duplication and dead ends.

Add/Edit delivery roadmap with design and engineering workstreams — Fig. 03The Add/Edit delivery roadmap — design milestones (architecture, prototype, verification) aligned against the engineering workstreams.

Research & discovery

Listening to the people whose livelihood runs through the platform

I led the research needed to uncover real pain points and bring UX into business operations: in‑depth conversations with brokers, agents, and appraisers; facilitated working sessions; validated personas; and concept testing that shaped what got built. The findings were direct — the UX process needed to be documented and repeatable, and mobile mattered more than the org assumed.

Presenting the Bright MLS homepage to a room of real estate professionals — Fig. 04In the room: presenting homepage directions to working agents and brokers for direct feedback.

Lead-generation workshop poster with sticky notes and dot voting — Fig. 05Workshop poster from the lead-generation session: goals, pain points, resources, and opportunities gathered on stickies, then dot-voted with the group.

Listing-agent empathy map built from sticky notes — Fig. 06The listing-agent empathy map from the same series: what agents think, hear, say, and struggle with — in their own words.

Listing agent persona: works 85% from mobile, lives in marketing tools — Fig. 07One of six validated personas: a listing agent who works 85% from her phone and lives in marketing tools — a profile that pushed mobile up the priority list.

User-interview insights table: ranked findings with status, criteria, title, and description columns — Fig. 08Research packaged for action: user-interview insights ranked and categorized, so product teams triage findings instead of reading transcripts.

Bright MLS deck title slide: 'Lean UX — Applying iterative methods to UX design' — Fig. 09The pitch deck that introduced Lean UX to the organization — iterative methods, argued in Bright's own brand language.

Design system

One system for five platforms

Fragmentation was the root problem, so the fix had to be systemic: documented color, type, and component standards that five platforms could share. Defined once, the system gave every product team the same building blocks — and gave design reviews an objective reference.

Fig. 10Design-system groundwork: one documented color palette to unify five platforms.

Fig. 11Button standards — hierarchy and states defined once, reused everywhere.

Core flows

The front door, and everything behind it

Login, recovery, settings, and navigation are the flows every one of Bright's users passes through. Each was redesigned to be unremarkable in the best sense: fewer decisions, clearer states, no dead ends.

Redesigned Bright MLS login screen — Fig. 12The front door for every user: login reduced to a single focused card.

Two-factor authentication screen — Fig. 13Two-factor authentication that feels routine.

Unified account and settings landing page — Fig. 14Account & Settings: one landing page replacing settings scattered across products.

Consolidated navigation menu design — Fig. 15The consolidated navigation: products grouped by task, not by internal org chart.

Responsive redline specification for the user menu across desktop, tablet, and mobile — Fig. 16Handoff as a first-class artifact: redlined responsive specs for the user menu across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

New products

From validated concept to go‑to‑market

Working across eight teams, I designed three new products from research through launch. Teams gave brokerages shared listings with real governance. Media Center centralized property photos, videos, and marketing materials. Listing Assistant attacked the most hated task in the workflow — data entry — by letting agents build a listing from the public record instead of a blank form.

Broker permissions screen for the Teams product — Fig. 17Broker permissions — who may act for whom. The governance heart of Teams.

Teams dashboard with shared listings and members — Fig. 18The Teams dashboard: shared listings and members in one view.

Media Center lo-fi wireframe — Fig. 19It started lo-fi: wireframes to settle structure before any visual design.

Media Center redesigned interface — Fig. 20Media Center, redesigned.

Listing Assistant: starting a listing from property search — Fig. 21Listing Assistant: start from search — find the property record instead of typing a listing from scratch.

Listing Assistant compare view: new listing beside the public tax record with one-tap copy per field — Fig. 22The core idea: your new listing side by side with the public tax record, with one-tap copy per field — retyping eliminated. Autosave and a completeness meter keep the long form resumable.

Selling the practice

A process is only real if the organization buys it

Establishing a repeatable UX practice at a data company meant marketing it internally: decks that made the method legible to leadership, research findings packaged so product teams could rank and act on them, and an iteration-review ritual that turned demos into decisions. These are the actual artifacts that carried the practice through the organization.

Bright Iteration Review process strip: iteration goals, overview, live demo, feedback, adapt — 'The iteration review is much more than just a demo' — Fig. 23The iteration-review ritual, formalized in five steps — “much more than just a demo.”

Outcomes

A UX practice the organization could keep

By the end of 2020, UX had become a structured, measurable part of the organization. The work improved the experience for 100,000+ users across the entire platform; design‑to‑development moved five times faster under the standardized process; two validated premium concepts opened a projected $1M–$9M in annual revenue; and five platforms operated under one design system.

Legacy Bright MLS dashboard before the redesign — Fig. 24Before: the legacy dashboard — dense rails, news-first content, and little hierarchy for a working agent.

Redesigned authenticated Bright MLS dashboard — Fig. 25After: the redesigned authenticated dashboard.

"Matt demonstrated exceptional perseverance and professionalism through a period of major organizational change. He independently led UX initiatives, integrated vendors seamlessly, and helped establish a consistent, repeatable UX process that elevated our design maturity."
Product Manager, Bright MLS

Reflection

What I'd carry forward

The most durable output wasn't any single screen — it was the practice: research with real users on a cadence, decisions documented against evidence, and a system that made consistency the default. If I did it again, I'd instrument outcomes from day one, so every improvement shipped with its own measurement built in.

Competencies demonstrated

Research Interviews · workshops · personas · concept validation

Architecture IA mapping · navigation systems · flow design

Systems Multi-platform design system · documentation

Leadership UX practice building · vendor integration · 8-team alignment