UX/UI Designer, Mobile
Immobilienscout24
Real Estate, Native Mobile Application
January 2016 - September 2016
The largest real-estate portal in Germany, Immobilienscout24 helps it’s 12 million monthly active visitors find their next homes.
I was part of a product team creating a user-centered search experience for iOS and Android. I led and participated in concept sessions and discovery workshops, created prototypes and participated in regular user testing sessions, and collaborated with designers and developers on final visual designs.
Goal
The goal of this project was to redesign the user experience of the search filter. While one did exist, it was a laborious process to enter real estate locations and to process results. These were the two main areas of focus.
Impact
The redesign of the search experience saw app store ratings, user engagement and conversion rates increase significantly.
4.3 star Play Store rating | 4.6 star iTunes App Store rating
19% growth in monthly active users | 35% growth in monthly sessions per user
Research and User Testing
Research was continuous on this project. We received feedback from user satisfaction surveys, app store ratings, and regularly scheduled user testing sessions.
Ideation Workshops
We conducted ideation, concept-sketching and rapid prototyping workshops. Topics for these sessions were chosen from business objectives or feedback from users. A typical session included the designers and UX researcher, an engineer, and a product owner.
The Location Feature
Entering location easily and accurately was a crucial step for our users. Users told us they wanted a fast tool that gave them a good sense of geographical distance. After several iterations of prototypes and tests, we developed a tool that let users enter location in several ways to match our persona’s preferences. Entering locations via text was the easiest, and built a easy entry tag system to accomodate this. For users who wanted to search by distance to another location, we developed a radius search tool. For users who wished to select even more specific areas, we created draw-on-map solution. When finished, the time and effort to enter location was greatly reduced and users had the ability to define areas with greater accuracy.
Results with a View
Some users wanted to view results by location, and others found a list view more efficient. In order to cater for both groups - we allowed users to easily switch between both views by scrolling. As a result of these improvements, the app saw a 78% increase in usage of the map feature. Fraudulent listings are prevalent on real estate portals in this market - to counter this we gave users the ability to hide suspicious listings from their results. Filters were kept in a prominent location to let users fine-tune their search criteria at any point.