How to get Real Testing/Feedback for your Real Estate Website?
Want real, honest feedback on the user experience of your real estate website?
Go inside Starbucks (or any other busy coffee shop), and offer to buy someone in line a coffee in exchange for spending 10 minutes browsing your website and providing honest feedback. Many people will happily take an extra few minutes for an ad hoc user experience interview/feedback session.
Be ready with very specific user scenarios. For example, tell them to find a home above a million dollars on the beach. Or, a home with 3 bedrooms and a view. Recently listed homes in 98119. Or whatever buyer scenarios you think your buyers are trying to solve. Watch them click around. Notice where they pause, what part of the screen their eyes wander to.
Ask them what sort of home they bought/sold/rented last, and where/how they found it.
In short, ask them as many questions you can think of for as long as they’ll give you the time of day.
If you do this with two or three people a month, you’ll have a diverse sample set to make decisions as to what parts of your website your time should be spent improving upon.
H/T to Jim Marks — this is how he used to test Virtual Results websites when I worked for him in 2010 (and likely still does). Note if you have a full custom and your vendor is NOT doing this sort of research, you should find a new vendor.
An alternative to real live coffee shop interviews are websites such as usertesting.com.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 20:42h, 07 SeptemberI have used usertesting.com but not the coffee shop method.
The best feedback I have had was from investors who are heavy users of my website and told me what they would like to see and how they use it. We did some extensive join.me sessions and I did get a lot out of that.
I watched videos of user actions on my website on Hotjar and that was very helpful, but after a certain point you do not get as much from it, as most users do what you expect them to do, go right to the photos, then if interested view more details.
One of the challenges I have found is my website has a lot on it, so asking for a 20 minutes session over a cup of coffee just allows them to give me their initial impressions without really digging into it.
I will probably need to use usertesting.com again as many changes have been made since my last session with them.
I remember Drew you gave me some thoughts at one point too on my website, but again it was mainly a 20 minute overview. You did not really like it by the way, LOL, not sure if you remember that.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 22:13h, 07 SeptemberYup, I do remember that. If you want more than a 20 minute overview from someone, they are going to have to be a good friend or you’re going to need to pay them. Have you asked your clients to do this for/with you?
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 23:27h, 07 SeptemberI have asked a couple and just had that one investor take me up on it. I think they spent hours with me because they felt the changes would benefit them, as they use the site a lot.
Thanks for suggesting usertesting.com. I forgot about them and will use them again for some specific pages.
Howard
Posted at 19:31h, 17 SeptemberThis is some of the best insight I’ve read. I think the strategy could apply in a lot of other areas as well. Definitely something I will be incorporating into my own work. So often a ton of energy is poured into analytics – not saying this isn’t valuable, but without real life feedback from the clients you’re targeting, all the data in the world isn’t going to get you very far.