In 2016, we updated the PropertyGuru.com.sg and DDproperty.com. With 16 million users every month across 4 markets, it wasn’t as straightforward as one would think but wasn’t rocket science either. Here is the journey and steps the UX team took for the redesign of PropertyGuru.com.sg and some learnings I noted along the way. It is also a way I reflect and think about how I could have improve our approach and I hope it will be helpful to other UX designers too.
Context
PropertyGuru is the market leader in Singapore, it started in 2007 and the website design didn’t change much since, so as design trends evolved, it started to look dated.
The website wasn’t mobile responsive even though more than half of our users are using a mobile phone to access the website. Mobile users were directed to a mobile site where users could only search, such laser focus meant that the performance of mobile website, in terms of leads conversion and cost per user, was already better than the main website.
PropertyGuru acquired rumah.com (Indonesia) and ddproperty.com (Thailand) in 2011. The acquired websites operated from different platforms and used different codebases. This meant that the same feature had to be built and tested 4 times. Therefore, priority was on platform consolidation to reduce effort and increase speed to market.
Step 1: Identifying Business Goals
We may be User Experience Designers, but we serve the business first. we see ourselves as a business investment and we need to produce business value through UX. UX designers are required to empathise with users, so the good news is, we already have the skills needed to empathise with our stakeholders too. When engaging stakeholders, our message is “how can we help”, not “this is what we do”. We do design workshops or design sprints to flesh out business objectives with various stakeholders. But we do not use design sprints straight out of the book, we tailor it to suit what we are designing for at that point.
Step 2: Understand User Behaviour and Journey
Solutions that we design should always solve a real user problem or “pain point”. I observed that a lot of companies spend a lot of time discussing, designing and building solutions, but not enough time identifying what problems exist and why they are happening. Studying user behaviours and motivations (qualitative research) gives us something tangible to grasp, instead of trying to conjure magic out of thin air. When you’re in a room full of idealists, it does feel a little Hocus Pocus.
There are a lot of misconceptions about User Research, the most common push back is Steve Jobs inspired “Customers doesn’t know what they want.” We made it clear that we don’t ask what they want, we want to understand their existing behaviour and problems, nobody will know it better. I love that the User Behaviour isn’t guesswork or ambiguous as people might think. User Behaviour is a cheatsheet to great products, the answers are in plain view if you know where and how to look.
For PropertyGuru, we read through previous research, we did a round of user research to check if previous research is still valid, we further validated the findings with quantitative data.
For user research, we prefer 1-on-1 interviews. It is fast, natural, rich and you can control it. I’d probably write more about doing user interviews in separate article. The goal of the research for mapping user journey, is to identify existing user behaviours. Design questions to tease behaviours out. Here are some battle-tested questions we use for property seekers.
- Are you looking to buy or rent a property?
- When did you decide to explore buying/renting a property?
- Why do you want to buy/rent a new property?
- Are you the only one who is actively searching? If not, who else is actively searching?
- Please walk me through, how do you start, what do you do next?
- Do you gather any information before you start searching?
- Can you tell me a time where property search experience was bad?
- Can you tell me a time where property search experience was good?
- Why would you recommend PropertyGuru. “ Can you rate your whole property search experience from 1–10? 10 being the best.
- Why is it not higher? How can it be higher?
I like to think that interviews are hypnosis sessions, we try to aid memory recall. Techniques and questions are designed to bring users back to the time and place where they were searching, so their memory recollection more accurate. After talking to 7–9 users, patterns will emerged. We then consolidate the findings and drew out a high-level user journey that looks like this.
Is this the user journey you use to disrupt the industry? No, there’s is another one for that. Is this user journey good enough for a redesign? Yep!
Next, validate qualitative research with quantitative data. If what users say they currently do is true, those behaviours will surface in the data. For example, you might see it in Google Analytics behaviour flow. Ideally, you should build proper conversion funnel in GA so you can surface more insights on the user journey but for quick validation, you can check behaviour flow.
Armed with a validated user journey, it is time to decide what to do next.
Step 3: Using the User Journey
I’ve seen organisations or designers that created user journey maps because IDEO did it. And they ended up on the walls or in presentation slides looking pretty (I’m guilty as charged).
UX designers call it the user journey. For the business, they might find it hard to relate. We told them it is our sales funnel. To get more leads at the end of the funnel, you need to ensure the funnel is healthy. We checked for leakages and optimisation opportunities and compared it with problems that users identified in qualitative research. After we synthesised both qualitative and quantitative data and identified the opportunities, we started creating hypotheses.
User journey is wasted if it is not actionable. Therefore we needed to turn it into one that informs us what to do.
I believe in Data. Data analysis is not a typical skill-set in UX but it is increasingly important and I believe it is essential. UX just doesn’t make sense without it. It requires time to cultivate this skill. I recommend doing the following to get up to speed, if you’re designing a digital product that is.
- Read Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Go through first Digital Analytics Fundamental and Google Analytics Platform Principles in Google Analytics Academy.
- Go through Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
After which, you should be able to draw up an enhanced map with metrics included. How do you decide if Search stage is doing well? What are the actionable metrics you can use. These are some examples we use at PropertyGuru.
Another good framework to measure UX is the HEART framework.
Step 4: Prioritise and Implement
Armed with user journey and data. It was time to prioritise. This is where design experience makes a difference. We needed to prioritise with an end vision in mind. The difference between a senior and junior designer is the ability to sequence design changes in a way that it doesn’t annoy existing users while bringing product closer to final vision.
A visual designer can take a look at PropertyGuru and recreate the website into a more modern design easily. In fact, it is a popular practice amongst UI designers to redesign popular websites that are not visual focused. Craigslist, Amazon, Linkedin are popular choices in design portfolios.
However, major redesign often comes with backlash. Facebook is famous for redesign backlash. We tried to mitigate backlash by doing iterative redesign in the following steps.
- Remove unused features (informed through qualitative data). There were a lot of information clutter on the website that can be removed for hidden so site appears cleaner on first impression (trial stage)
- Refresh UI. Existing features were given a fresh set of paints. This did two things, we did not move existing features so users could find them in places they were used to. Subconsciously, we were preparing them for more changes. Website started looking modern, yet features can be easily found.
- Rearrange features. Features and elements are rearranged to where they were meant to go. This was riskiest step, however by doing 1 and 2, it is now easier to see where features are being moved there should be lesser backlash.
We also broke it down into pages, listing details was updated first. It was getting the most traffic and had a lot more to benefit by being mobile responsive. The change in design led to a significant increase in leads conversion on listing details page and it increased overall leads.
Full-fledged redesign we did before caused a dip in conversion and leads which took more time to rectify compared to the iterative approach.
While pitching for iterative redesign, you will meet objections and negativity from stakeholders and engineers because it is perceived to take longer time and requires more effort to develop. Take time to build your case and collect data so unnecessary full-fledged redesigns can be prevented.
Property Details Redesign
We decided to tackle property details first because according to GA it was one of the top landing page (the first page that users see) and metrics were not doing well.
What you see is below is original. The urgency isn’t UI (placement, typography, colours, usability). The urgency was the page being mobile responsiveness and its subsequent user flow, since drop-offs was one of the main problem.
First iteration of listing details, all features were there. Even if we knew some would be removed eventually, it wasn’t the right time to do it. If there were enough perceivable changes, the creature of habit (that is all human beings) will raise the roof. In the subsequent iterations, we started removing and hiding more information. Managing change is part of managing User Experience.
The biggest change was mobile responsiveness. Kudos to the engineering team for their skills and understanding to pull this off. Being able to support 2 different platforms on one site across multiple markets, each in various stages of completeness is no walk in the park I’m sure. There was a lot of mutual trust to be able to pull it off.
The result were positive compared to original but not good enough. We had a mobile website and the conversion and cost per user was still better in mobile website. We had 2 more iterations before the metrics matched and overtook mobile website metrics. We then killed mobile websites, lesser products to manage.
Search Results Redesign
The next beast was search results, ranked 2nd in landing traffic, part of 2 stages in user journey (search and select). It was further complicated by revenue generating products that resided on this page. With any existing revenue generating products, changes will be difficult. Being consumer-focused needs full organisational support, I don’t think this is possible without top management creating that mandate. In my short period here, I think PropertyGuru is true to its words of being consumer-focused.
Thankfully, consumer-centric is not a new concept. There are numerous case studies that showed how consumer-centric companies were able to disrupt industries and make unadaptable companies redundant. Most companies would have already understand the risk of not being adaptable. I once had a chat with an engineer practicing agile, he said that you can use whatever method you want. Call it agile, lean, innovative or design thinking etc. User behaviour doesn’t change until we attempt to change it, these terms are just means to understand and change those behaviours. Everything is rooted in the human. But I’ve digressed.
In the search results, the same tactics were used. First, we removed unnecessary information, and let it sit for a sprint (2 weeks). Next we applied the new UI. For example, we kept the search filters on the left. The message was clear, PropertyGuru is changing, but we didn’t move your stuff.
Finally, we built the intended design. As always, refer to the metrics to align your design goal, don’t design for the sake of aesthetics. The goal here was to increase clickthrough to details, reduce bounce and again mobile responsiveness and cross-country platform consolidation. The outcome was positive, bounce rate reduced and clickthrough increased. When top funnel improves, you will have more users to convert at a later stage in the user journey.
What about revenue products? What you take away, promise to replace it with a better version. We created some new products for sales that will benefit both users and advertisers. They will be launched in Jan 2017, so stay tuned.
Homepage
The page that people are naturally obsessed with, sometimes for no good reason. This is why being acquainted with quantitative data is important to anyone building digital products. For a long time, PropertyGuru homepage is a page for user to get to Search. Index is a technically a homepage, but it isn’t “home” until you designed it to be. Which was not the scope at this point.
It was easy to look at this version and say it sucks but if you talk to PropertyGuru fans, they love it. Yes, surprise! How do you justify design changes when users do not want design changes? Data data data!
Stick to metrics. What are the metrics you want to change here. Less bounce, more search? More clickthroughs on certain features? Align with the business and then decide on what to do.
The technique that worked well before was used again for homepage. Remove, Refresh and Rearrange. Below was the first iteration, we were courageous in changing most of the site except the search. This was the same psychological technique for existing users.
This version was around for 2 sprints, we measured the whole funnel to ensure metrics were healthy, before moving on to next version.
The top consideration was again mobile responsiveness, there were also considerations in terms of how UI elements that could be reused and utilised across the sites. For example, the search bar we used in the final version, was the same search bar in search results. This allowed the users to enjoy a consistent UI as well as saving engineers time in development and testing.
For mobile responsive version, we knew that mobile website had performed better, therefore we tried to match design and features in mobile website before iterating further.
Can design be improved? For sure, design is never done. As a visual designers or UI designers, this isn’t one of our best works. But UX designers need to understand the importance of speed. A great design needed time for refinement. If more than half of our users are accessing website on mobile and you are not showing a mobile responsive site. That is a clear priority, design refinement can happen later.
Step 5: Measure
You had the business goals, now you got the data. Measurement is always the most satisfying part. The overall business outcome was to increase enquiries and conversion. You’ve identified the user journey and the metrics you needed to improve along the way to ultimately increase enquiries.
Many companies try to increase conversion at the stage of conversion. You’ve seen exit popups, takeover ads, sticky menu etc to entice user to convert. Through user journey, you’ll understand that conversion happens at every stage, right from the beginning, and by optimising each stage, you should get better overall results.
In the whole exercise, we improved conversion rate and leads for 4 markets. Although the redesign focus was on Singapore, the UX improvements were applied to all markets. These results are achieved over many iterations, over 5 months. Some design hypothesis didn’t meet their objectives too, it is important to be persistent and not give up easily.
Step 6: Communicate
UX designers serve the business first, be sure you are disciplined about the quality and cadence of communication. It is up to you to decide what is the most effective way of communication, is it a bi-weekly summary email, updates during stand-ups, 1-to-1 updates or structured meetings, or even write about it? I’m still working on improving my communication.
Most UX designers I encountered are passionate about UX and believe it can make a difference in the world. Don’t waste all that effort and passion. Share, pitch, talk about it.
Remember to share failures as well, being transparent about failures will give you more credibility when sharing successes. If an innovative digital organisation does not tolerate experiments and failures, it might not be the right culture for innovation.
Summary
This was the UX approach for PropertyGuru Redesign. Website is still not completed. Design is never finished. In my head, I have so many hypotheses and iterations to test and so many questions to answer. We’ve not even touched on digital disruption, but that is definitely in the horizon.
I would love to know your thoughts, and if you had similar experiences, what were your challenges and what you’ve learned.
None of these was possible without the awesome team, UX Designers Ann, Mitushi, Kitja. Engineers Pedro and Czarnie. QA engineers Rupa and Sreejith.
