OJO Home Listing Page
Mobile Web App
User Experience, Product Design
6 months // 2019-2020
At OJO, I worked on the consumer app, a conversational AI platform that empowers consumers to make better decisions in the home buying process. My responsibilities included redesigning the home listing page, as well as improving ways to get feedback signals from users. As the new enhancements or features rolled out, it was rewarding to see the consumer engagement rise and business metrics improve.
Credits
UX, research, prototyping, design - Kailyn Lim
Design system - Zak Weiland, Kailyn Lim
Product - Kara Armstrong
Development - Tom Grochowicz, Thien Vo, Ronly Leung, Jessica Miller
Home Details Redesign
Project Overview
The OJO home listing page is the most visited page in the app, as it houses a tremendous amount of content and functionality about both the home and its associated neighborhood. It is also where OJO can learn a lot about the users' preferred style of home and enrich their recommendations going forward.
Problem
As additional features were added to the page over time, the efforts had become more "bolt-on" than thoughtful. Users had no clear way to schedule tours, and they had a difficult time finding the information they were looking for.
Solution
Make discovering new homes easier and more delightful by re-ordering the sections and improving visual hierarchy and consistency in the home listing page.
1. Research
In addition to the research that had already taken place prior to my start date at OJO, I did some quick research on my own.
INTERVIEWS
The perks of working on a consumer product - finding people to interview was easy! I had a few of my friends review the existing home listing page and got their gut check
  • Photos: natural gesture would be to swipe, as well as to tap on the photo to see it full-screen
  • Open house CTA: it's shown too early. Would like to see more info about the house before making that decision
  • Map: it would be nice to zoom out to see the major intersections. Seeing nearby grocery stores, gyms, etc. would be extremely valuable
  • Neighborhood: not enough information on the page to know what the icons on the neighborhood card represent
  • Feedback modal:: some of the options available on the feedback modal are too broad. There was fear that answering this would negatively influence future home recommendations
    • SITEMAP
    Since I was new to the team and product, I created a sitemap of the consumer app to make sense of the overall information architecture.
    COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
    Keeping up-to-date on what the competitors are doing is part of a designer's job. The competitors I closely monitored included Redfin, Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Open Listings and Localize.city. I mostly took notes on how they structured the page and prioritized the MLS data.
    2. Define
    After my preliminary research, I worked with the product team to create a more concrete list of user problems, design solutions and hypotheses for the MVP version. This would be an ongoing project; we would launch the MVP version first, followed by subsequent releases with updates.
    CHANGE PRIMARY CTA
  • User problem: I want to tour the home but don't have a clear way to do that in the current app
  • Observation: There is no CTA to "Tour a Home" on the home listing page; it's only on the "Contact Agent" modal. Also, the current "Ask OJO" primary CTA isn't providing much value to the users or being used frequently
  • Hypothesis: If the primary CTA changes to "Tour Home", the users will find it more readily, thus increasing the agent referral rate
    • REORDER THE SECTIONS
  • User problem: I want to quickly find information about the house to see if it's a good fit for me
  • Observation: There is currently no progressive disclosure in the description & details section, which makes it difficult to scan. The flow of the content on the page also feels a little broken
  • Hypothesis: By rearranging the home listing sections and adding progressive disclosure, the users would be able to discover the content they're looking for more easily
    • EXPAND THE PROPERTY FEEDBACK OPTIONS
  • User problem: I want to give feedback on a house, but the options to choose from are too broad
  • Observation: In several of the user sessions where we reviewed the property feedback flows, we learned that the choices felt too broad to the users. Some were also afraid that sending feedback would over-filter homes
  • Hypothesis: By working with the data science team to add more granularity to the feedback options, the users would provide more feedback on homes and receive better future home recommendations
    • 3. Ideate
    When I started sketching and wireframing, I tried to not feel limited by the current data capability. OJO was in a unique position to be able to utilize all of the explicit and implicit signals from the users in providing better home insights and recommendations in a few months.
    4. Prototype & Validate
    Everyone on the consumer app team was very excited for this redesign! For being the most visited page in the app, it was finally getting the love it deserved. The devs were happy to provide feedback when I shared the design progress during weekly design reviews. They ensured that I had designs for every zero and error state scenario. I created a clickable prototype in Figma and ran guerilla tests with colleagues to get usability feedback.
    Final Deliverable (MVP)
    Takeaways and Ideas/Exploration
    Post the launch of MVP, there was an increase in property feedback (18%), property page CTA (41%), and referral rate (0.5%). As more data and metrics rolled in, I started to brainstorm and do exploration work on future improvements:
  • Switch secondary CTA from "Ask OJO" to "Thumbs up/down" - while "Ask OJO" has a promising future, it's currently not robust or valuable to the users. On the other hand, OJO could use as many explicit signals as possible to enrich its data and recommendations
  • Move "Ask OJO" inline and pre-populate with relevant questions - as OJO gets to learn what feature(s) are important to each user, it'll be able to surface relevant feature-related questions for the users to choose from (fewer clicks/taps = happier users)
  • Show "highlight features" on each listing - OJO can show top highlights for each listing above the fold. These highlights would be personalized to each user on the features they actually care about
  • Improve the neighborhood details page - this was another page that needed a lot of love! Location and neighborhood play a big factor when buying a home, so I focused on providing area insights, such as nearby shops, schools, crime, and similar homes
    • Kailyn Lim