REALTOR.ca
Generating key user insights to drive content strategy
“REALTOR.ca is the #1 real estate website in Canada for both buying and selling real estate properties, including additional real estate information and resources”
Summary
REALTOR.ca wanted to understand more about the specific information needs of its core user base, apart from the main real estate listings. One of the tactics and strategies under consideration was to create an information hub, or one-stop shop, that could provide users valuable real estate information all in one place.
My user research findings allowed REALTOR.ca to create a content strategy and content roadmap based on the gaps of information that users felt were either missing or hard to find
Client
REALTOR.ca
Methodology
Qual/Quant research including user interviews, surveys
My Role
User Research, UX Design
Activities
Personas, Journey Maps, User Testing, Taxonomy Design, Wireframes
Getting Started
We kicked off the project by conducting a discovery and requirements gathering session with key senior stakeholders. This would give us an overarching understanding of goals, objectives and challenges that would provide a baseline of where to focus our research efforts, tactics and tools to be used. We also conducted an assumption workshop with the client team. This was particularly helpful in creating our preliminary research questions.
Assumption Workshop
Cutting through the fog of ambiguity
Confirm the scope, direction and focus of our research efforts
Understand “what they already know” “what they assume they know” and “what they want to learn”
I conducted a client stakeholder assumption workshop with the REALTOR.ca team to:
Dealing with the first curveball!
My agency partner decided to take a survey-first approach, rather than leading with the typical qualitative (user interview) approach first. This was done mainly for participant screening to identify potential user interview participants. However, this presented some challenges
To mitigate this challenge, and to balance identifying the right participants for user interviews with the need for quantitative data, I made sure to include survey questions covering some of the most important information gaps we identified in our client assumption workshop
Generative Research:
Going from ambiguity to understanding user pain points, needs and unmet needs
Personas & Journey Maps
To create our personas, I synthesized our data and created affinity maps for theme clustering. I created personas for each of the three audience groups capturing basic demographic information and current homeowner status as well as deeper insights related to thoughts, habits, pain points, motivation as well as use case scenarios and context of use in order to understand previous home buying experiences. Similar to our personas I created three user journey maps for each of the three audiences identifying four recurring phases of their journey: needs assessment, research and house hunting, decision and purchasing, post purchase and home ownership. Within these four phases our journey map identified: core activities, the various touch points audiences interacted with, peaks and valleys they encountered as well as overarching feelings and pain points. Craft&Crew’s Director of Experience Design created all visual artifacts for both personas and user journey maps.
Visual design by Craft & Crew | Persona data, analysis, synthesis and output by Dots & Loops
Wireframes & Taxonomy
With a clearer idea in mind of the content needed, I set about creating a taxonomy of topics based on recurring subject matter and themes identified by our interview and survey participants. These topics were based on either gaps of information our users identified or topics that were harder to find online. I completed the taxonomy phase with two rounds of usability testing to measure success vs. error rate and overall findability and efficiency. Lastly I created new wireframes to support the new taxonomy as well as creating new wireframes and strategy for the main listings pages. The new listings wireframes allowed us to contextually and organically surface up call-to-actions that would link to relevant categories in our new taxonomy. This approach was rooted in capitalizing on the large amount of regular traffic to the listings pages
High fidelity wireframes by Dots & Loops
Proposed taxonomy by Dots & Loops
Testing and iterating our taxonomy approach
We conducted two rounds of user testing using 10 primary tasks focused on findability and effectiveness of our taxonomy labeling. In our second round we made some important revisions, continuing to use the principles of good controlled vocabulary concepts
Business Outcomes
Opportunities Found
Research efforts uncovered unmet user needs and information gaps within the buying and selling process. Addressing these factors would help differentiate REALTOR.ca in a crowded market
Value
Created
Research insights helped guide REALTOR.ca’s content strategy, showing them where to focus their efforts. Additionally, placing key CTA’s to the new content areas within the high traffic property listings would increase awareness of this new content
I would love to discuss more details about this project; feel free to get in touch to schedule a call or meeting. Email me at: dotsandloopsdigital@gmail.com or send me a message using the form.