Engine Digital

The Trilogy brand from Shea Homes continues to evolve the active adult residential experience, providing premium living that brings together freedom, wellness, and connection.

To build on this brand promise, and extend an exceptional real-world experience online, Trilogy looked to Engine Digital to reinvent My Trilogy Life, a private and secure, personalized online platform that enables members to connect, explore, engage, and grow.

World-class resort community. Exceptional online extension.

When people buy a Trilogy home, they’re also buying a resort-like lifestyle that’s driven by the active communities around them. To extend this experience online, Engine Digital adopted a transformation mindset, and partnered with Trilogy to create a digital product strategy to deepen the level of engagement for their resident members with a tool that unifies the homebuilder’s ease of living brand promise, both online and off.

Unified for brand. Personalized for residents.

Every Trilogy community is familiar in its devotion to enabling active communities and lifestyles. What sets each apart are the particular interests and needs of each community. To replicate this nuance online, Engine Digital allowed My Trilogy Life users to answer the question of what exactly a Trilogy life consists of, letting them personalize their experience with events and content that satisfies their own interests.

Accessible by design.

My Trilogy Life is designed for a baby boomer audience whose technological savvy has evolved into one of the most active demographics on social networks. Still, the specific needs of this unique user base had to play a role in our planning and design process, with end-user testing to inform our decisions around typography, content structure, and location of active elements.

Community engagement, at a micro level.

The obvious question at the outset of this partnership was the elephant in the room. Why not Facebook? The answer lay in our desire to engage communities at a micro-level, with a small scale, hyper-contextual social network that was simple to use with a focus on a single purpose: to foster a specific type of community online. Trilogy’s willingness to invest so much effort into realizing their post-purchase brand promise was an inspiration for the team that helped to bring it to life.

Customized for user needs.

Getting this specific with our audience meant an off-the-shelf technology stack wouldn’t do the job. Instead Engine Digital went custom, and built a product from scratch. Using a Laravel PHP framework that allowed them to deliver a bespoke experience for both Trilogy community residents, and the admins tasked with managing the content for them, Engine Digital was able to go beyond the capabilities of many popular grab-and-go solutions.

Shipping success with a clear onboarding process.

While My Trilogy Life fosters online community at a micro level, Engine Digital had to think big when it came time to deploy it. Since the platform was a legacy product that had databases full of over 10 years of user data and past events, a solid migration plan was needed. And when it came time to roll the new platform out across Trilogy’s vast network of communities, Engine Digital worked closely with their client partner engineers to ensure everything went smoothly.

About Shea Homes

Trilogy is part of Shea Homes, America’s largest privately owned new home builder, primarily building mid-to-high-end homes in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington and Texas. As part of J.F. Shea, founded in 1881, the organization has participated in 3 of the US’s top 10 construction and engineering achievements of the 20th century—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Interstate Highway System. Engine Digital has been a digital agency partner to Shea Homes since 2006.