Three usability tips from my weekend of surfing the net

This last weekend I started looking for a rental property - I’ve never had to do that before so it’s a brand new experience for me. But we are building a house so we need to rent somewhere while the build happens. It opened up a whole new world of pain from a digital perspective. I don’t know if anyone at realestate.com or any of the many real estate agents will read this post, but I really wish they would as there are some very, very frustrating usability issues with the way the whole real estate market communicates with its renters. I actually started to wonder if people even want me to rent their house! Well here are a couple of things I would change that would help them put the customer (me) first. 

Don’t deploy new the functionality if it is a poor user experience.

Realestate.com.au have this fantastic functionality where you can bring up a map, enter all your details and then find a place that meets your criteria. It’s a great piece of functionality and I wish every real estate site had something similar (rent.com.au - something for the future!). However, if you move the map, then click on a house, when you go “back to search” everything has reverted back to where you started from and all of your “criteria” has disappeared. So if you have spent 10 minutes refining your search, moving the map so its just right, then zooming in to the area you want to focus on - that’s now all gone. You need to spend another 10 minutes doing it all again! So while the map functionality is great - the couple of times I’ve used it it’s been a terrible user experience and actually made me go looking for other web sites! That’s when I found rent.com.au but more about them later.

Don’t think something is working great just because you have a positive response - measure the negative as well!

I received some confirmation emails that had these massive headers at the top of the email. I was out and about looking at all the houses I had shortlisted so I was trying to read these emails on my mobile phone (like every other person out looking at houses on the weekend). But when you open these emails, because of the size of the banner, the text is tiny. You have to turn your phone sideways, then using both fingers zoom out the text. Its takes 2-3 times as long to simply read an email! When I spoke to one of the agents at the open for inspection, he said he had complained and he gets complaints all the time, but the marketing department say its getting a good response. Seems the marketing department is a slave to the stats from their web site and are not listening to “real” negative feedback here. I wondered how much damage this was actually doing to this company’s brand!

Don’t make ridiculous demands on people in the name of “security”.

Ok, I’m not a security expert, but I don’t think we need to insist on 10 letter passwords to make our logins safe. I personally use a product that stores all my passwords and generates a new password automatically, so it’s not a massive deal as I can just get my password program to generate a 10 digit password that includes a capital letter, a number etc. However most people are not like me and most people use the same password for everything. What you should do is insist that its safer than most - so a capital (maybe), a number and a special character should be part of the password and then it is unlikely to be “guessed” with some random word or number generator. Making stupid demands on people who are trying to log in to your web site just creates barriers - and you haven’t even started to “work” with them yet! The site that made me sign up then proceeded to ask me all about the house I was applying for - yet I’d just been referred to this site by the agents site and in that referral was the house address - why couldn’t they also pass the details I was now being asked to enter? These are simple things guys, why are you making it so easy for someone else to come along, build a better solution and steal your business. This is the digital world we live in - its not like a retail front where its difficult to go to another store that seals your stuff - we just go to Google and type in what we need and we almost always get a page full of options!

So from my weekend of frustration I came to the conclusion that with a little bit of focus on some detail, these companies could really grab a hold in their markets and differentiate. I wonder who will make the investment…...