Lead Designer + Product Owner
DoorstepsSwipe
AWARDS + RECOGNITION
Inman Innovator Award — Doorsteps Swipe•2014
InStyle Best of Digi — Doorsteps Swipe•2014
Appy Award — Doorsteps Swipe•2014
Apple’s Top 5 Best New Apps — Doorsteps Swipe•2014
Apple #1 in Lifestyle Category — Doorsteps Swipe•2014
PRESS
The Washington Post — The mobile way to buy or rent a home
ReFindly — How Doorsteps Swipe is taking over the real estate world
Inman News — Realtor.com-powered Doorsteps Swipe strips listing search down to its core
Buzzfeed — There's A Tinder For Pretty Much Everything
Cult of Mac — ‘Doorsteps Swipe’ Gives You Some Idea Where You’d Like To Live
iOS
Designed for the curious home browser, Doorsteps Swipe reimagines the home search process with a swipe-based interface, inspired by the simplicity of Tinder.
It makes exploring thousands of real estate listings effortless and intuitive, offering an engaging, daydream-like experience.
Identifying an Opportunity
When we created our first product, Doorsteps, we noticed a recurring pattern: users weren’t simply searching for homes—they were browsing. Many spent months, even years, scrolling through listing photos, not as immediate buyers but as dreamers, explorers, and future homeowners envisioning possibilities.
Most real estate platforms focus on catering to ready-to-buy shoppers, overlooking this vital aspirational browsing phase. Recognizing this gap, we saw an opportunity: today’s renters are tomorrow’s buyers. With that insight, we set out to build a search experience that was specifically designed for them—one that encouraged exploration, inspiration, and the joy of imagining what’s possible.
New paradigmSnew problems
The introduction of a swipe-based UI pattern to real estate search presented exciting new challenges and opportunities:
If location isn’t the primary focus of the search, then what drives the results?
How do we define the criteria of a search?
Who determines what’s relevant in the search results?
Is there even a fixed set of criteria?
Traditional real estate platforms are built around location-based search—users input a specific area and receive listings based on that location. However, our research uncovered a distinct behavior among Aspirational Browsers: they were far more engaged with listing photos than with the actual location.
By adopting the swipe paradigm, we redefined the home search experience. Instead of being solely location-driven, the process became an image-driven discovery journey. This shift allowed us to create a more intuitive, inspiring, and engaging browsing experience, tailored to users who are exploring their future homes—not just searching for one.
First Week of Launch
+ 23.4% conversion rate
02:24 length per session
24 swipes per session
As of July 2015, Doorsteps Swipe had over 20+ million swipes
Produced and written by the Doorsteps team ///////////// Directed, shot and edited by Michael Chung