New Mobile Website Experience 1-10-2018

After months of extensive testing our consumer website team is proud to reveal our new mobile experience!

This update greatly enriches the user experience, provides an enhanced mobile search, and packs a punch with some serious performance improvements. Let’s jump right to the results, and share what the team has accomplished…

8.2% higher conversion rate across all sources

25.9% lower bounce rate

44.6% higher average session duration

Improved conversion rates have obvious benefits, but the big gains in sessions duration, and bounce (reduction) rate are what can provide more opportunities. These improvements mean that users are spending 44.6% longer on the website (more user friendly), and are bouncing at a lower rate. If you’re not familiar with the term a “bounce” is when a user leaves a website after viewing only 1 page.

Now for the updates! (Special guest writer for these updates is our consumer website director Jared Smith) 

The Updates!

New Mobile Gallery View

Upon landing on the mobile gallery as an unregistered user (say, from Google Adwords), you are presented with a much richer experience:

• Cards have large images
• Favorite properties are easily recognized without taking as much away from the photo
• You see how many photos are inside
• Same great information on beds, baths, and how long the property has been on the site

Registered users get an additional benefit: Each gallery card becomes a photo gallery in and of itself for even faster browsing.

Property Details Pages

In our Property Details Redesign experiments in 2016, we noticed that mobile users took very favorably to large, headlining images. We took this a step further in our latest update, and made this very smooth/swipable, making for a natural app-like experience across platforms. We also wanted to ensure that search results and the ability to contact an agent were within thumb’s reach — important in this day and age of gigantic phablet screens.

The page expands and contracts to reveal more information in properties you are interested in. This keeps scannability high without detracting from our ability to give you as much MLS data as we can. It includes an inline payment calculator and easy access to contacting an agent about a property you’re interested in. We also have a new twist on related properties — we are now showing the next five results from your search on the property details page instead of the dynamically-generated related properties list.

New: Native Driving Directions

Want directions? We now are able to send you to your phone’s native mapping app to do driving directions. This is a better experience for users, because they can receive voice-enabled turn-by-turn directions rather than having to peer at their phones to figure out where they are going.

And, thanks to the native back button in Android as well as the software back button in recent versions of iOS, it is simple to return to the website.

Contact Agent/Request Showing

Want to ask about the property? It’s super simple — tap the “Contact Agent” button at the bottom of the screen to get taken to a form, already pre-filled out if you are registered (and easily pre-fillable using your phone’s autocomplete if you aren’t registered yet!)

Scheduling showings is now wicked easy, too. Just tap the “Schedule a Showing” checkbox and a very tappable date picker will open up, giving you options within the next four days and the ability to determine what time of day is best for you.

New Mobile Quick Search

One of our key goals when designing and building this update was to make searching on the phone fast and effortless. Part of this effort was to expose the most-frequently-used search options and make them as accessible as possible. We looked at searches conducted on mobile devices in Google Analytics, and built an interface that emphasized the searches one is most likely to conduct on a phone.

But what if you need more options?

Enter Power Search.

Power Search

The toggle in the top right corner of the search menu (also available as a button on the bottom of the search area) engages Power Search. This option exposes all of the available search options, allowing users to get as fine-tuned with their searches on mobile as they can on the desktop.

Savings Searches

Landscape Mode

We have brought a purpose-built landscape mode to the sites for the first time. It emphasizes easy navigability with dedicated navigation on the right side. Photos are also enlarged to maximize the usage of screen space. 

Whew! That was a lot of updates. As we roll this out to all websites our team will continue to test, tweak, and tune. We expect speed improvements to come with this update as well, and will publish those results once the testing is complete.