The broker website is one of the major pieces of the BoomTown system. You can see an example at www.TheCassinaGroup.com. Over the next few posts, I’ll be talking about some of the innovative things we did that are unlike most real estate websites.
Because the major use of a real estate website is to search listings, making the search easy and powerful was the main goal. This can be tough at times, because a power search means filling out dozens of form fields, and that takes away from ease of use. So, with respect to area, we wrote a custom .NET control that allows for a scrollable list of checkboxes. Rather than having a huge list take up half the page, we can keep the screen real estate down, and since we had a few different types of area filters, like Area, City, and Zip Code, we grouped ‘em together with tabs.
That upper area packs quite a punch for occupying so little area. We’ve tried to build it so that if you’re looking to search by a certain thing (Zip Code, Neighborhood, etc.) it’s there for you, but if not, it gets out of your way. Progressive Disclosure in Jakob Nielsen’s parlance.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | boomtown-news, design, usability
