One of the things I’ve always disliked when searching for real estate is how clunky the whole process is. First you fill out a form that’s nine miles long, then get blitzed by a grid full of stats and a tiny little thumbnail of the property. Then you basically have to open each result to really get a feel for that particular listing – pictures, details that you care about. Our solution is the Preview Pane.
Clicking on a search result shows you a preview of the property that has all the pictures, and the key stats that someone’s likely to be looking at to decide if this place warrants further investigation. This way you can quickly get a feel for a listing, and move on if it’s not what you’re looking for.
We try to gather as many stats as we can about how the website’s performing and how folks are using it. One stat we track is the ratio previews to views, and we’re glad to see that the number of previews is far higher than the number of views. This means that people are using the preview and it’s helping them filter the results and get to the listings that mean something.
From a technical standpoint, it was important to make the preview fast, so we use Ajax to fetch the preview data, and Javascript to scroll through the photos. Not necessarily bleeding-edge stuff, but the quicker someone can see the preview and size up a property the better, and it’s been a great success so far.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | design, usability
