Finding Home
How might we improve the experience of finding a home in a highly saturated real estate market?
JustProperty is a property portal developed by JRD Group. Launched in 2008 in the midst of the global financial crisis, JustProperty rose among the ranks of property portals in the Middle East. Today, JustProperty and its parent company, JRD Group, have been acquired by Property Finder, the MENA region's leading real estate portal.
I DID
User Experience
User Interface
DURATION
May 2015 - Oct 2016
The Vision
In 2015, while rebranding our portal, we wanted to improve the search experience. In a market saturated with properties, we wanted to help users find their perfect home. We wanted JustProperty to be their go-to guide when it came to renting or buying property.
Breaking free from our original branding, we decided to also push the boundaries of our product to be more in line with our brand values.
this project began with a campaign titled ‘find yours’ designed to enhance the experience of finding something as personal as a home.
First Steps
We conducted surveys with a sample size of 30 participants. This helped us understand the current standing of JustProperty from a brand and usability focus, and informed us about user behavior when it came to property hunting. It helped us identify what users found most important when searching for a home to invest or live in.
Some of the questions we asked were:
Are you a home owner or a tenant?
Which property portal do you prefer to use when looking for a home to buy or rent?
What are the difficulties you face when trying to find a home in Dubai?
What are the key factors that help you make a decision in your home finding journey?
conducting a survey enabled us to gather insights from users that we otherwise may not have identified
Findings
We were confident that we had a robust property search engine, and we needed to know if our users were able to use it to the fullest of its abilities. Our survey helped us identify certain questions that we felt need addressing.
Users want content that can guide them with their decision. Which locality should I be looking for properties in? Are there parks and restaurants nearby? Which schools could my kids go to?
Users want better ways to get in touch with real estate agents. I’ve called the agent but can’t get through, can I request a call back?
Users want to see comparative property pricing. How much does it cost to rent, buy or sell a similar property in a different locality?
Defining the Scope
Based on our findings, and our branding goals, we decided to build a design backlog that we could work on over the coming months. Some of the key stories we wanted to focus on were:
Redesign the search block to encompass frequently used criteria
Rethink sponsored/ad units on the home page
Simplify the map view search functionality
Introduce the ‘Neighborhoods’ guide for users to access more useful information and content about various localities in Dubai
Give users the ability to send their requirements to multiple agents in one go
Allow users to request a call back from Agents
Wireframes and Prototyping
With our design backlog in place, we started chipping away at the stories based on prioritization from the product manager. We started with basic wireframe sketches which allowed us to pivot quickly and move forward. UI was rendered in Adobe Photoshop, where we could present high-fidelity designs and mockups to management for approval.
We then used InVision to create click-through prototypes for simple feature testing by our support and QA teams.
Feedback
Once our stories were developed by the tech team, and deployed on our staging servers, we wanted to see how our users would respond to them. One of the features that needed this validation was the updated map search. We designed an A/B test to see if it was something our users would want as their default search option.
Fifty percent of our users became the test group with the map search as the default search option. Our control group was served the list view as before. The results of the A/B test showed us that it was a very small number of users (~8%) from the test group that retained the map view as the default option. However, a sizeable number of users in the control group (~32%) were found to be frequently using the map search feature and then switching back.
Testing methods like this helped us design the visual and structural hierarchy of various features based on their importance to our users.
Release
We finally shipped the all new JustProperty to our users in September 2016, and we were incredibly excited with the outcome of the project. These were our final designs: