THE SEARCH FOR A HOME STARTS WITH A PLACE
Not a filter. Not a listing. A place on a map. Buyers and renters open the map first — they scan transport, parks, surroundings — and only then look at listings. This makes the map the central tool in real estate at Avito, the world’s largest classifieds platform. For seven years, it stayed largely the same.
THE SAME BLUE
The old API we used to live with forced a fixed palette — blue tones, yellow roads, colored pins. Every new feature was bolted on top of existing constraints. Visual noise. Limited customization. A product the team had outgrown. As the designer responsible for the Avito Real Estate storefront — I own everything between a user's search and every visit to a listing. Seven years of the same. My job: make year eight different — and every year after that easier to only improve, not rebuild.
FIVE PRINCIPLES
I led the full cycle: immersion, competitor analysis, vision, ranging, specs. I mapped how the world's best map products approach these problems — their decisions, their trade-offs, their design logic. Airbnb, Zillow, Idealista, Fotocasa, Trulia. Then seven years of internal history. Then the principles every map decision now runs against ↓ Simplicity. Mute the base layer. Make pins approachable, not aggressive. When a person opens the map, they should immediately see listings with prices, nearby metro, and relevant infrastructure — not a fight for attention. Contrast. The map background is never uniform — roads, parks, rivers, buildings. This isn't a stylistic choice — it's a systems challenge that has to hold across every theme, every context, every scale. I moved to white pins with black text — maximum contrast on any background. In dark mode: black pins on a dark base, where the background itself becomes the contrast to any content: photos, icons, text. Customizability. The old blue pins blocked an entire layer of product development. You couldn't add a photo, an icon, or a badge without visual compromise. However, anything reads on white. I chose that path. Promoted listings rotate inside the pin — no more fighting for space. With the new architecture, each category — travel, rentals, sales, commercial — gets its own context and can customize the map for their needs. Globality. How simple a thing is to forget of looking beyond domestic competitors. The key is to make a quick sanity-check globally with every new decision. Now everything designed scales across all of Avito's superapp verticals, not just real estate. Freshness. When you work on a map for months, you risk losing the big picture in the details. Details matter — they shape mood and perception. But the mission is clear: clean, simple, beautiful — minimal accents. Adding contrast, color, accent — easy. Removing? Less so. Every new element risks turning the map users know into something they don't recognize. Is that a goal?
THE STANDARD
Every decision through three gates: cover-checks with real users, A/B tests, global benchmarks. Not Google Maps or Yandex — but the best real-estate-first map experiences in the world. The bar: finding and evaluating a home should feel better here than anywhere else. Mobiles shipping July 2026, Desktop — September 2026. And wow — the tests before new monetization mechanics already gain grey results — the biggest fear of dropping a funnel because of loosing the color is gone. Huge for such a complexity! Everyone up the chain is watching. The vertical's biggest hopes concentrate right here.
IN THEIR WORDS
"The map was an elephant nobody knew how to start eating — her analysis helped us see the problems and where we could end up." — Sergei Salnikov · Sr. Product Analyst "Strong leadership and deep expertise — both in design and in managing the work plan." — Dasha Travkina · Lead Researcher