Connecting users to homes & agents
If you've ever bought or sold a home, you know how nebulous the whole experience can be. Designed to simplify the process, the consumer websites aid consumer users through their home buying and selling journey. Connecting consumers users to homes through a core search feature, the consumer sites serve as a suite of tools to connect consumers with agents and homes.
Composed of three main segments: the brand websites, the company websites, and the agent websites, all of the consumer sites are tied together by the core search feature. Configured in slightly different ways, each segment helps consumers and represents a different level of the brand.
View the consumer websites:
Understanding the brand structure
To understand the consumer products of ZipRealty you need to understand the context of the business. As sister brands ZipRealty, ERA, Century 21, and Coldwell Banker are all part of a larger franchise group called Realogy Franchise Group.
Each brand is a franchise that provides technology and resources for the companies under that brand. Each of these companies has agents working for them and each agent has a multitude of consumers that they serve. As the technology division of this franchise group, all of the ZipRealty products including the consumer websites serve multiple layers of users: Brands, Companies, Agents, and Consumers.
Searching on the consumer sites
The brand website
One use case of a consumer user is to enter our home search experience through the brand level website. The Brand's homepage introduces users to a search bar, and lets them begin their search immediately. Entering a search from Brand's homepage, users then lead to a list of homes on a search results page. On these pages users can explore homes, filter search results, or enter new search criteria.
Coldwell Banker homepage
Search results on Coldwell Banker
Logged In Vs. Logged Out
An important part of the user's search experience is the difference between being logged in vs. being logged out. Logged out or unregistered users are not assigned agents in whatever area they are searching in. Where as users who are logged in and registered are automatically assigned agents in any area they search in. For the user agents act as a point of contact to view homes and answer real estate questions. In this way the logged in and registered user has an optimized experience. In addition to having an agent assigned to you, we have a registration barrier to contact an agent anywhere on the site. We do this for two reasons:
We want to push registration to capture user account information
&
assign users an agent for lead (user) allocation.
The logged out user without assigned agent
The logged in user with an assigned agent (agent block + header)
The company homepage
Made for a different use case, the company homepage caters to users who are referred to that company by an agent or a company broker. Although users can organically search in a location and find there way to this page, the more common use case for a user is the referral.
Modular in design each company website has our core search feature, information about the company, and customizable widgets that show company homes, agents, social links, etc. Companies can turn widgets on and off, and customize elements of the homepage like the hero image.
The agent homepage
Similar to the company homepage the agent homepage trailers to similar consumer use cases. On the agent homepage agents mobile apps, profiles, reviews, and properties are featured. Again, like the company homepages agents are able to turn certain modules on or off.
For lead allocation, users are tagged if they enter their home search through an agents homepage. In this way, users are assigned this agent if they search in an area that agent serves.
Challenges of the websites
Working with a legacy product
The most mature of all the ZipRealty products, the consumer websites were one the most challenging suite of products to work with. Not truly responsive the consumer websites have select mobile optimized pages. Meaning that only certain pages of the site are optimized for mobile viewing. If you take a look at the sites, you will notice that each Brand, Company, and Agent homepage are mobile optimized.
The reason for this being that the consumer websites are built on an older code base that does not incorporate responsive HTML/CSS. To create a mobile optimized view, each mobile optimized page had to have their code amended. A few questions arise from this structure:
1. How do you provide a cohesive user experience if the entire site is not responsive?
2. How do you phase in UX or UI improvements?
3. What is the development time of these extra efforts?
Creating a cohesive user experience
To answer a few of these questions, we created a cohesive user experience for our mobile web by designing mobile pages for our core search features. This included search, search results, and our home detail pages.
Designed for the mobile web, these pages differ from our desktop web pages in that they run off of a separate code base. Although not a perfect solution for the responsive web, it allowed us to launch a mobile web experience for the consumer users.
Incoorportating feedback & research
Constantly releasing and iterating on the design, we keep a close ear to user feedback and issues from our support team. In addition to this, we consistently run small A/B and multivariate tests.
Hearts not stars
An example of simple A/B test was when we tested consumer preference between heart and star icons to save a property. Saving a property is an integral part of capturing user registration since we implement a registration wall to save a home. Optimizely test results on consumers indicated that the heart icon outperformed the star icon by 18.4%...although both icons outperformed the current Save button CTA.
Improvement in invoking registration (value in %)
Furthering this research we ran another test to test placement of the heart CTA. An interesting find was that placement of the heart icon on the property photo itself resulted in a 50% conversion in total completed save home events. This was the highest conversion rate for this CTA thus far. This lead us to hypothesize that placement of the icon on the photo created a greater call-to-action for the user, a contextual-call-to-action.
