To go a bit further, a rank formula is a bit geeky. What you really want is for users to describe their needs and the system creates a rank formula for them behind the scenes. For example, when we bought the house we currently own, our requirements included:

3 bedrooms (yes, I mean bedrooms — we have two kids and we wanted each to have their own bedrooms)
1 or more office rooms
1 play room for kids
1 “media” room
1 guest room
garage space for 2 cars
yard for kids to play in

The actual house we bought was listed as a 3-bedroom house. But two additional rooms meet the legal requirement for being a bedroom (size, egress, and ceiling height; some states also require a closet and these rooms have one). We probably saved money because the sellers didn’t list it as a 5-bedroom. One of those extra bedrooms is our office. Another is a combination tv room/media room/rec room/guest room. Notice our requirements didn’t include a living room. We got one anyway, along with a “family room” which was a play room when the kids were little and is now a gym.

Fortunately, we used a very high-quality search engine — a realtor. She took our very human requirements and used them to sort and rank potential houses. If you can come even close to what a human realtor can do, then you’ll have something.

I haven’t drawn a picture, but the picture is the easy part. What’s the model look like?

P.S. on the video. Is it claymation? I thought it was computer-animated.

Here are the changes in my approach:

1. Clear a bit more room in the header menu row to make room for the options we want to bubble up.
–Changed “Search Listings” to simply “Search”. I think you can do without the word Listings. Users with even novice web service experience will see the Down arrow and get it. I doubt changing this text would impact usability test results much.
–Changed “Save this Search” to simple “Save Search” and removed the e-mail icon. Again, same justification as the Search Listings text change.
–Move Drop-down menu headers on the right side a bit closer together.

2. Bubble up what appear to be the most common search filters: Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Max Price.
–For Max price, truncate $100,000 and $1,000,000 to $100K and 1.0 M (et cetera with the increments).

3. For the sake of usability, each time one of these filters is changed, the view is refreshed to reflect the change. (Are there instances where from a performance standpoint this gets too expensive?)

And also:

In the actual Options flyout, the ‘Close’ link by itself doesn’t add any value. It’s confusing to me that I change settings, click that link (since I’m drawn to it) and nothing happens. I actually have to click the “Search Listings” button again. I bet new users would be less confused if there was a link in there that said ‘Update’ (or something similar) and even change the ‘Close’ link to ‘Cancel’.

G – Here’s a pitch for my design. Searching using the advance filter options is still one click. A user would have to click the “all” link instead of the “price,beds,baths” links. I guess the naming of “all” should be changed to something else that encompasses all of the search parameters.

The purpose of the “price, beds, baths” link is two-fold. First, it’s an indicator to show that there is a way to filter their search, and is visually more discerning than a down arrow. And two, it allows for people to quickly filter their search without having to wade through all of the advance search options, which they can still get to with the “all” link.

And lastly, I loved the video. It’s weird. I wonder what people are thinking when making clay bunny rabbits running around in NYC.

Savan, I like your designs, but don’t think we should put advanced filter options two clicks away.

Marcelo, when do you want to get lunch?

And yes Jina we really need to do .5 baths…

Very disappointing that no one commented on the bonus video. I watched it a few more times today, too… simply incredible!

Great ad, I wish I had been there for filming to see that giant bunny.

Seems that Boing Boing says Sony ripped it off from Kozyndan.

kozyndan is a Los Angeles-based team of artist/illustrators known for their digitally painted pencil drawings of contemporary urban cityscapes and surreal interior spaces. Comprised of husband and wife Dan and Kozue Kitchens, kozyndan creates both fine art and commercial projects, and has been showcased internationally to much critical acclaim. [link]

I think a great design should highlight the top things people want to filter by. Both of the designs I’m proposing expose this, though the second one does it to a lesser extent.

Design One

Design Two