Seda Sean • UX Design

Who is it for?

Doorsteps Swipe was designed with Alice in mind.
Alice is a persona we created based on user research. She represents our Aspirational Browser, a person who dreams of buying their first home someday and spends their free time perusing real estate listings for fun.

Discovering a NEED

When we created our first product Doorsteps, we discovered that our users spend a lot of time browsing listing photos (months... years...). This phase is the discovery stage: the time when our users are browsing real estate for fun, to daydream. 

The majority of real estate search experiences are designed for the serious buyer. We wanted to create a search experience for our Aspirational Browser. We saw a need - an opportunity. today's renter = tomorrow's buyer

RENTER TO BUYER TIMELINE

Shaping the user experience

When Tinder came out, it was like a eureka moment:
we found our differentiator. 

Traditional real estate search is location-based: 

• the user types in a location s/he knows beforehand
• user is given search results based on location entry

Our research revealed that our Aspirational Browser is more interested in the listing photos - the location is secondary.

Adopting the swipe paradigm effectively turns a location-based search into an image-based search.

Exploring The new frontier

Adopting the swipe paradigm brought forth a lot of challenging new questions. 

• If location isn't the primary focus of the search, then what is shown in the search results?
  • How do we define the criteria of a search?
  • Who defines the criteria?
  • Is there any criteria?

We focused on our user's needs: surfacing the most important information and letting everything else recede into the background.