Does It Really Move the Needle?

One increasingly common refrain I hear among product managers, designers and engineers everywhere is the question of whether a new project will “really move the needle.” During an idle chat with Redfin about how we could analyze traffic patterns and touring activity to determine if a listing was likely to sell quickly, the great Dan Fabulich declared he didn’t want to talk about it since it was hard to imagine if it would “add millions of new unique visitors” or “raise revenue 20%.”

I love Dan, precisely because I have never met such a pure engineer — he wears Ms. Pac Man t-shirts quoting Dickens and runs Harry Potter conferences — with a deadly commercial instinct.  His comment brought to mind a drug dealer I once heard about, who happily declared on an FBI tape that “if it ain’t a CONSIDERABLE piece of business, I ain’t gonna f*** with it!” As my brother’s law-school class would later learn, this statement was enough to move the dealer up from petty crime to racketeering. In our own world as dealers of addictive websites, we all want to think like gangstas, and think big.

But there’s also a place for artistry and craftsmanship, for starting small. When painting the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci didn’t ask himself if each brushstroke would really move the needle. He was painting first to please himself, alone and ecstatic. The most profitable websites I’ve ever seen were made by people who weren’t obsessed with profits. They wanted to fix a problem that drove them nuts or to impress a cute guy or to create something gorgeous for the sheer joy of it. They weren’t afraid of failure, and they didn’t “pivot” when faced with their first setback.

But now, as the bubble drives us all to think like Groupon or Twitter, we are in a year of frantic, magical thinking. We lose sight of the user, and lose sight of ourselves, in pursuit of the almighty dollar. The beginning of the end for Microsoft’s innovative phase was when it began quashing projects that couldn’t conceivably lead to billion-dollar businesses, as if anyone could really know how tall a flower can grow before watering it. Redfin began as a website designed to please home-buyers and home-owners — and designed first to please ourselves — from which, quite improbably, tens of millions of dollars have flowed.

I am not arguing against a healthy dose of skepticism for any website feature, nor for the quarter-bath, search-by-houseboat incrementalism that leads to a complicated user experience rather than a big new idea. I love it that Dan is thinking big, and thinking deadly, about whether a new project can become a killer application. But when we think about a killer application, we still want to think first about whether it will delight people, starting with ourselves. From that, the money will usually come.

Our Maps Are Googley Now

Redfin just released a new version of the site. In addition to improving our short sale detection in Orange County and parts of LA and making our neighborhood pages a little more discoverable from the map page, we switched to using Google Maps exclusively instead of a mix of Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps.

We decided to do this now because our two-year contract with Microsoft was up for renewal. We did an evaluation and figured out a way to draw a large number of pushpins on GMaps very quickly. When we went with VE in 2006, GMaps was faster out of the box but slower once we started drawing on it, especially on IE6.

We like a lot of things about going with Google Maps:

• Fast downloads
• Fast drawing speeds
• Broad browser support
• High-resolution Geoeye-1 satellite images

We don’t like that we can no longer embed Bird’s Eye views on our site and that 3 developers spent four weeks to do the switch instead of adding more features. Plus, Redfin has had a very good relationship with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team, which we’ll miss. We’d like to give special thanks to Sujatha, the Microsoft PM who answered our e-mails, calls, and random entreaties with the utmost of professionalism and speed. We really only have good things to say about VE. Anyone looking to build a map-based Web 2.0 site has two solid choices.

In the end, it was speed, speed, speed that convinced us to switch. In our worst case scenario of 500 pushpins on the map in IE6, GMaps is 385% faster.

“Every millisecond counts” is a “Googley” UX design principle that we remember from Marissa Mayer’s evangelism of speed and that we strongly believe in (see here, here, and here). Users who come to Redfin’s site now should see maps load and render just a little bit quicker, which makes us feel a little Googley inside.

That’s it! Happy holidays from Redfin Engineering. You won’t hear from us until February, as we’re already working on a major release that will take a little more time. But it’ll be worth it. For those of you using the site, can you notice a performance difference? Leave a comment and let us know!

Bonus for developers: read about our experience switching from Virtual Earth to Google Maps. 

Redfin Writes the Book on Usability

Maybe you can’t tell, but we work hard to make Redfin easy to use, going round and round on every design until we’ve forgotten where we started.

In an effort to improve our forms, ace product manager Matt Goyer bought a book on usability for one of his young charges, Jim Lamb. But when Jim started reading the book, he found that one of the forms the book was supposed to help us improve was already in the book:

On the left side of the page pictured here, you’ll see Redfin’s Offer Wizard.

When Matt came into my office to show it to me, I could only think of Groucho Marx’s rejection of any club that would accept him as a member. “Wow,” I thought. “It’s time to get Jim another book.”

(In fact, the book looks fantastic. Many thanks to author Luke Wroblewski for including us!)

Message in a Bottle

We’ve been experimenting with messages in various locations across Redfin.com. Recently, we placed an announcement in a message box at the top of our map page. Once the box is closed, it disappears until we run a new message.

When we released the latest version of Redfin.com, we ran our first message this space announcing our new neighborhood pages. The text was: “New! Pricing trends for every neighborhood. And more.” With “neighborhood,” we linked to a respective city page for each market. With “more,” we linked to the Redfin blog post about the features of the latest release.

We were worried that placing an announcement across the top of the map would annoy people searching for homes. We ran the message for a week and tracked how often people dismissed the box and clicked-through to the links.

Click-Through Rate
The total click-through rate (CTR) for the message box was high (1.95%), higher than any other message location on Redfin.com. For the “neighborhood” anchor text, Seattle (2.93%) had the highest CTR and Southern California (1.35%) the lowest. The anchor text linking to the blog post had a CTR of 0.15%, which is not surprising given that it was the second link in the message.

Dismissal Rate
The dismissal rate for the message box was 1.50%. DC had the highest rate (1.86%) and Boston had the lowest (1.08%). The dismissal rate was lower than we expected. The low rate is likely due to the fact that users: 1) weren’t seeing the box; 2) were unable to find the X to close the box; or 3) didn’t mind having the box on the screen.

We’re thinking about trying out a few different treatments for the box- different colors and different length messages to test how the dismissal and click-through rates change.

What about you? Did you notice the message? Did you leave it open or click it away?

And The Leading Bookmarking Service Is…

In our last release we added a “Share on Facebook” link to our details pages that when hovered over brings up a menu from AddThis letting you bookmark the home to your favorite social bookmarking service.

Before launching the feature we debated what the top service would be. Glenn, voted for Delicious, I voted for Facebook. In fact I thought Facebook would win by a long shot which is why we used the text “Share on Facebook” instead of something more generic like “Share on…”

Curious who won the bet we used the AddThis analytics feature to settle up. Here’s a breakdown of how many times the various services have been used:

Of course, maybe the fact that the link specifically calls out Facebook is the reason it is the leading bookmarking service :).

Here’s a breakdown by day.

In our next release we’ll add a Facebook icon in front of the link to increase its discoverability.

Big thanks to Dan, for pushing us to use AddThis.com, instead of adding only a Share on Facebook link.

Redfin has search options!?

While one wing of the Redfin office wrestles about changes to the home tours program the other wing of the office is up in arms over how we surface search options on the map page.

When we re-designed our website in April one of the changes we made was hiding the search options. The reasoning behind this controversial design was that since users spend most of their time navigating the map and only occasionally change the number of beds or square footage that they’re looking for, we should make the map as large as possible and move the search options to an overlay. The overlay then only appears when you give focus to the search input box or click a widget.

Initially to display the search overlay pictured above users would need to click the link ‘Filter Search’:

However, we heard occasional stories of users not knowing they could search on number of beds or price. So our next design was to include a drop down widget besides the search button. This is reminiscent of what many Windows applications do or what Facebook does.

But still we heard stories of users not knowing they could change their search options. With our next release we’re looking at combining both the link and drop down widget approachs by moving the drop down widget and changing the name on the link to hint at what it enables you to change:

Unfortunately a number of co-workers stormed into my office yesterday, criticized the design and called me names. If I were to pass you the Redfin Search Product Manager baton how would you solve this discoverability problem? Feedback welcome but Photoshop submissions preferred :). To sweeten the pot we’re offering $250 if we use your submission. However, if you have a winning submission the real question is, why haven’t you applied for our interaction designer position yet?

And with that I’m off to Whistler. Happy Thanksgiving!

Vote Early, Vote Often

Redfin has been futzing around with some new designs for the home page of our website and could use your help picking one out. Our goals are to get people searching and to explain how Redfin works.

We only get one shot at the explanation because returning visitors see a view of our map as they left it on their last visit. Many are so thunderstruck by Redfin’s search superpowers that they never realize we have to make a living buying and selling homes.

When we surveyed our customers about what they wanted to see on the home page 58% asked for an explanation of our commission refund, 47% for an overview of our company, and 45% for a step-by-step guide to the process. But you should just say what you want: even though this blog is by and for people at an absurd remove from reality, please don’t feel like you have to channel anyone normal. It never works.

Here are the choices, which you can click to enlarge:

1. Illustrated explanation of the buying process:

2. Photo illustration of the buying process:

3. Who we are, in paragraph form:

4. Who we are, in bullet form:

Tell us which one you like first, second, third and last; suggest modifications or an entirely new treatment. Thanks to Savan Kong, Jason Wu, Michael Young, Matt Goyer, Jeff Yee, Marc Singer, Dana Irming, Bryan Selner, Leo Shklovskii and many others for their input so far. And thanks to everybody else for your feedback now…

We’ll also post a link to Redfin Forums, too.

Is Your Neighborhood Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?

Moving to a new neighborhood and want to know how it compares to your current digs? Now you can! Today Redfin added community and school information links on every listing detail page, you even can do head-to-head comparisons. Currently available for Washington and California listings, we’ll add new markets as we expand so you’ll be able to check out those areas too.

Scroll down a bit and look for the above box on the left-hand side of the listing detail page, usually below the “Sales History” box. Note: clicking on the links will open another window, leaving your Redfin search intact on the original page.

I checked out my own Zip Code (98109 in the Queen Anne area of Seattle) and immediately homed in on education level and school test scores. I think I secretly wanted to know if my neighbors could hold their own on the new hot game show where “smart, educated” adults pit themselves against a handful of Golden State fifth-graders. I learned some fascinating conversation topics for my next cocktail party or playground chat with a neighborhood fifth-grader … I’ll crush them with my local knowledge.

A few things I learned about my area (which you can discover about your current or prospective one too!):

1. The median age is 36.28, not 9 (the average age of a fifth-grader).
2. Summer break comes at just the right time. July’s average high is 74 degrees!
3. The bachelor-of-arts crowd dominates at 31.2 percent, beating the fifth-graders at only 1.4 percent.
   
4. We’re under average for murders, but we must have easy-to-steal cars because the motor vehicle theft rate is more than 300 times the national average.
   
5. Earthquakes are the biggest weather risk – eek! A reminder for Seattleites to go to the mailbox and vote … tunnel, viaduct, both or neither?! sigh
   
6. Another cool thing you can do is compare cost of living, down to how much more or less your clothes will cost.
   
7. Out of 15,395 people, there are only 63 fifth-graders. Majority rules!

Warning: the comparison feature is addictive! I looked at a couple different cities I’ve lived in:

1. If I wanted to move back to Redondo Beach, Calif., I’d need to get an 11 percent raise to maintain my “Bud Light” lifestyle.
2. I could go back to Pullman, Wash. and get by with 37 percent less money (a round of drinks at the Coug on me!).

We also added open house information, when available. In the next couple months, they’ll be easier to find, but right now you will see the information under the house photo on the listing detail page.

Look for the above box under the listing’s main photo

An added bonus for you trivia hounds out there (real questions from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader? – no cheating!):

1. Which U.S. border is longer – Canada or Mexico?
2. Name the ship the pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England to the Plymouth colony in America in 1620.
3. How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?
4. How many U.S. states border the Pacific Ocean?
5. If you mix equal amounts of red and yellow paint, what color do you get?

Stumped? Comment or shoot me an e-mail and I’ll give you a hint – cynthia.pang(at)redfin.com.

An F in Usability

Best Web posting on design this week is by the Great Dane Jakob Nielsen, who charted 232 people’s eye movements as they scanned a Web page, and discovered that they go across the top, then across again but lower, and then down the left side, describing an F on the page. Handy for Redfin as we figure out how to blast our home-shoppers with our demented money-saving propaganda. The article has thermal images super-imposed on a screen; it would be interesting to apply the same measurement to people’s perception of other phenomena, such as house photos.