The following is a guest post by John Phillips. John is Creative Lead at Local Matters. John leads the user experience design of our real estate search product, Destination Search Real Estate.
Lately, I have been working on our real estate platform. Part of this work involves researching how the leading real estate sites (i.e. those listed on page one of a Google search for “real estate”) work. I do this to get a lay of the land and see what the top sites have in common.
One of the things I’m looking for are design patterns. A design pattern is “a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem,” according to Wikipedia.
If there is a pattern being used by several of the top sites, it is likely that visitors to your site will be familiar with it. And if you follow the pattern, it reduces the amount of learning visitors have to do. Following common patterns makes your site easier to use.
Put another way, the best user interface (UI) is one you don’t notice. And, making the UI transparent involves identifying design patterns.
I found two strong patterns in my research.
Pattern #1 – Layout of the Search Form on the Home Page
Most real estate sites have search forms that look something like this:
There’s a large location field at the top, then fields for price range, then menus for the number of beds and baths.
To give you an idea of how common this pattern is, I collected the search forms from the top real estate sites. Here they are:
As you can see, they all use nearly the same layout. All except for one:
This site uses a very different layout. (I blurred part of the image to make it harder to identify the site.)
A home is a big purchase. Likely the biggest one most people will make. So, the people visiting your site are probably visiting other real estate sites.
On the sites that use roughly the same layout, the visitor doesn’t have to spend time figuring out how the search form works. If they have visited any of the other sites, they already know how it works. But on the site using a different layout, visitors have to figure out how the search form works before they can use it.
So, there is hidden cost to not following patterns, the cost to figure out how that feature works on your site.
The operating principle here is “Don’t make me think.”
Pattern #2 – Search & Refinements on Results
Another strong pattern is the arrangement of the search form and refinements on the results page. A simple search form –just the location field and search button– is shown at the top of the page. The refinements (beds, baths, price, etc.) are shown in the left column.
Again, this pattern is very common. All of the top sites, except two, follow it. It’s safe to assume that a large portion of your visitors are familiar with it. It is what they expect.
A behavioral pattern also emerges. If you change your search location, the refinements stay in effect. This was initially a surprise. In most types of search, a new search clears the refinements.
On a real estate site, it makes sense to keep the refinements. The number of bedrooms, baths and the price range are constants in a home buyer’s search. Put another way, searching a different location doesn’t change the number of people in your family, or the mortgage you qualify for.
So, real estate has a different pattern than other types of search. And again, you should probably follow this pattern. It is common enough that it’s safe to assume your users are familiar with it.
Following the Pattern vs Leading the Pack
While patterns are important, I don’t want to suggest that you can’t be innovative. However, you are better served to try new things in areas without strong patterns. And, you should test your new designs to see if they work.
Returning for a moment to the search form on the home page. In truth, this arrangement of fields is probably not optimal. In the universe of possible options, there are likely designs that perform better. Here are two guidelines for finding these designs:
One: A design that is different, but only a little better, doesn’t stand much chance. If people have to learn how a design works, they perceive this as a cost. The benefit of the new design has to outweigh the cost of learning it.
Two: Improving the form likely involves removing fields and menus, not adding them. The fewer inputs on a form, the easier it is to use. A single field that responds intelligently to queries like “2 bedroom 2 bathroom homes in Lakewood, CO” may be a better design. It would also require a significant development effort. Generally, a simpler user interface is not easier to create. There is often a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make stuff simple and easy.
In an upcoming post, I’ll share some of the places where I think we are improving real estate search, relative to the top sites.
Thanks to our guest blogger, John Phillips. John is Creative Lead at Local Matters. He is responsible for translating user goals and business requirements into experiences that delight users. John leads the user experience design of Destination Search Real Estate.
