Saved houses
Funda, 2023
Improving an existing feature - saving listings, on "Funda", the biggest housing platform in the Netherlands.
The old version of the feature didn't get a lot of traffic. While there was no real way for us to determine the exact reason for the lack of engagement, we still believed in a form of that feature to increase our connection with the users. To be able to learn what they like and are looking for, and then - how we can help them further. Since we couldn't prove that the visual aspect was the key, we took on this project on a few fronts: A visual improvement, new functionalities and increased visibility (entry points, links, etc.).
Identifying Problems
The old design had some straight forward issues: Each listing took a lot of vertical space, it was both too detailed and too generic for the users, it was unclear what some buttons do, plus some buggy interactions.
Research
We started interviewing people who were actively searching to buy a house.
A few key learnings were:
- A lot of them weren't aware of the existing feature.
- All of them were either looking with a partner, or sharing the options with others, for advice.
- Some were looking in several different areas, or considering different types of properties
Design
We prioritised a few first solutions that we'll be able to start small with and potentially improve over time as we reassess their performance as we go:
- Offer more entry points for users to add a listing to Favourites (along the "investigating a listing" flow, in the media viewer, in the contact broker confirmation message), to increase awareness and comfort. Quick implementation of this as the first step, before any other redesign resulted in a 26% increase of saved listings.
- Enrich linking throughout the platform - add more actionable options everywhere that makes sense, like contacting the agent from the save listing card, click through to the saved listings area in more places, etc.
- Design the saved listings as cards that save a lot of screen space, align with our existing components library and common universal conventions to offer a better overview and prioritisation of certain details.
- Allow users to divide the saved listings into lists. A whole separate research went into the different options around what type of lists to offer (ready made and based on the buying process, or maybe generically named, or to allow users to name their own lists...)
- Allow collaboration - give users the ability to share their favourites with another user/s.
- Give users as much information and help using data we already had and could indicate at that point and not only rely on data the user contributes. That's where adding tags to indicate the stage of "seriousness" came in. For example: If the agent was already contacted by the user regarding this saved listing - we'd add a tag to it. Then we could apply a sorting option by the different tags.
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