Project Overview
With an intuitive search process and elegant design the hugely popular realestate.com.au mobile applications helps users stay on top of properties to buy or rent anywhere, anytime.
Organisation
Team
Kevin O’Neill – Delivery Manager
Nick Paton - Producer
Luke Cunningham – Technical Lead
Matt Dalton - Designer
Steven Holloway - Developer
Mujtaba Hussain - Developer
Myles Abbott - Developer
Jesse Collis - -Developer
Michael Rowe - Developer
Ben Thomas - QA
Project Brief
The search for real estate is not one confined to a desk and takes users out and about to house inspections, auctions or exploring new neighbourhoods. With this in mind we needed to create a mobile experience that gave users what they needed while out and about.
We set out to make an application that makes searching for property simple, beautiful and fun.
The search needed to be simple, search results need to be shown early, refinements needed to be available and property details needed to be displayed without taking away from a property’s photos.
In line with this functionality it needed to be presented in an elegant simple interface designed to be interacted with, not just a website on the phone.
With this in mind we narrowed our functionality to produce an application that focussed on the most important property search functions; property search for buy or rent, contacting agents, saving to calendars and location based features such as get directions and local search.
Project Innovation / Need
An ever-growing number of users were found to be accessing both our mobile and full sites from 2 particular mobile platforms iOS and Android and feedback indicated that our m.site was not meeting expectations.
With our mobile applications we were able to focus on specific consumer goals that combine with a phones specific functions to produce a streamlined property search that focuses on helping consumers find properties.
We undertook a great deal of research when scoping the application. Research told us:
• Over half our users only search by suburb. So we ask for just a suburb for a user to see results. These can then be further refined at the user’s leisure.
• Saturday when users are at inspection was a key traffic time so we included current location search so users can search for available properties around them.
• A search’s criterion stays the same. So we allowed introduced drag and release to refresh a search.
• Users like big images. So we offer full screen images when a user tilts a property details screen
• Users need to contact agents so we made it simple to contact and agent via email, phone or save the details of inspection and auction times.
• Users like to save lists of properties so we offered bookmarks
User Experience
For the ultimate user experience our app had to make property searching simple, it had to be useful and finally it had to be elegant.
We made searching for property easy:
• Start with just a suburb
• Suggested suburbs help avoid user errors
• Current location search for quick searching
• Drag and release for fresh results that match the current search
• 20 initial search results more are loaded automatically when the end of a list is reached
We made it useful:
• All states of the app are remembered when the user returns to the App
• Properties can be locally bookmarked
• Important dates can be saved straight to the phone’s calendar
We made it elegant:
• Information is kept to a minimum to let keep the emphasis on the photos
• Elegant flip and design transitions
• Full screen images can be viewed with a simple rotation of the phone to landscape
Project Marketing
Marketing of the App has focussed internally with banner advertising on both our desktop and mobile websites combined with some investment in SEM, mobile and display advertising. Active property hunters were also targeted through print advertisements within real estate agent magazines, while broader awareness was generated through outdoor and radio advertising in the Sydney and regional Queensland markets. With this marketing effort the App has received over 350,000 downloads and maintained a position inside the top 5 in the lifestyle iTunes category.
Best Audience Migration to Mobile Technology
This category recognises migration of an audience from a traditional media to a mobile platform.
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