Perks of buying a home via Housing.com
Introducing Housing.com’s Privilege Price Cards
Buying a home in India can be an extremely overwhelming process, both financially and emotionally. Home buyers spend a few odd months to finalise a property that fits their choice and budget. That’s a given since property buying involves a lot of criteria like affordability, the amenities in the property, locality access and appreciation, legal sanctity and the reliability of the developer .
We, at Housing, understand and cater to our users’ needs. Not only do we allow our users to communicate efficiently with agents and developers, but also provide reliable and verified information about the property. However, we do realise that buying a home is not the same as buying any other commodity online.
One of the major aspects in the user’s home-buying journey is face-to face negotiation with the seller.
Buyers spend most of their time in just debating about payment clauses and dealing with middle men. Some look for banks with good EMI or loan offers while some for agents who can help them waive off registration overheads. These are necessary hassles and a part of human nature. Privilege Price Cards provide discounts over the negotiated price.
Privilege Price Cards!
A privilege price card is applicable on one or more properties and includes exclusive offers for cash back, home loans, payment plans, stamp duty, registration fees and furnishings. This is how it works:
Explore
The user can explore and shortlist properties with savings.
Buy
The user can buy the price card applicable on his shortlisted properties.
Redeem
The card can be redeemed at the time of property purchase. Refund if the card goes unused!
Building the experience
We started off by iterating on use cases and detailing out corresponding flows. After multiple discussions with stakeholders from product and business teams, we identified buyers in the discovery and decision-making phase as intended users.
Discovery Phase : These users browse with an intent of discovering good deals and offers on properties. They might have an idea of a few localities or developers where they might be interested to invest.
Decision Making Phase: They can be assumed to be users who are further ahead in their buying process where they would have researched and shortlisted a few properties.
Iterations and more iterations
The primary flow for privilege price cards is where the user discovers cards with the best deals on the list page and purchases the one applicable on his shortlisted properties.
Price Card List Page
Users can gather context and scan through all price cards as per their preferences, on the list page.
Final Design:
- The list page experience was customised for first-time and returning users to make sure every user understood the concept of privilege price cards. Onboarding was done by default at first and could be revisited later.
- The cards could also be filtered by card price, locality, developers and BHK preferences.
The Price Card
The price card needs to highlight the maximum savings and offers to start with. Information like the price of the card, redemption period and valid properties are some of the many decision making factors.
Final Design: This layout gave enough emphasis to important details like the card name, card price, availability of the card and also highlighted the savings very clearly. The participating developer was explicitly shown for users who scanned cards valid on their chosen properties.
Card Details Page
The card details page communicates discounted prices and unit level information for all valid projects which helps the user decide if he wants to buy the card or not.
Final Design:
- The most important action on the card details page was the buy option which was placed on the right after assuming that the user would like to consume all the information before buying the price card.
- The user would also be able to view savings on every unit in a particular project.
- If a user opened this page via a project, the details of the triggering project would be shown first since that was exactly what the user was looking for.
We finally introduced callouts/triggers on properties for specific price cards and also some global triggers like that on the home page and property results page.
The Final Outcome
A couple of prototypes were made in Principle and Marvel post the first few rounds of iterations to make sure we catered to user traffic from all channels. Let’s have look at the final user flow and product.
Once we had locked down all our features for desktop web, we continued working on emailers and messaging, which were the last bits that completed the user experience in all respects. We’ve had an exciting last 3 months conceptualising, designing and developing privilege price cards and are equally thrilled to hear what our users have to say about it.
View (and may be purchase a few) privilege price cards at www.housing.com/privilege-price-cards
A big shoutout to kanupriya jain, Rahul Bhosale, Jekin Gala, Gaurav Joshi and Sruthi Sivakumar. More posts coming your way from the Housing Design team. Till then, would love to hear about anything you liked or something that you think could have been better.
