Overview

In early 2020, I carried over a colleague’s responsibility for the design of Map & Local Information in Realtor.com. Neighborhood Discovery was then a project in progress from the team. Different from my other teams who embrace “mobile first”, this team had started building Neighborhood Discovery’s skeleton on desktop web. 

Resuming the project from where it was left off, I have two main goals:

• Complete the design and launch the product to the market

• Adapt the design for our mobile platforms

Problem

Home Shoppers often search homes in locations they are not familiar with. They might be moving for a new job, or their kids are going to a new school etc. It is critical for them to find the right neighborhood suited to their own lifestyle. However, in the existing realtor.com, and most of our competitors, it is not easy to do.

• Most of real estate sites are property focused. In a property listing, user can get various information to know about the neighborhood. But it will be extremely time consuming and painful for user to looking into dozens of listings to only find out that is not a right neighborhood.

• Home searching usually occurs in the granularity of city or zip-code because they are more commonly known and remembered. Searching based on neighborhoods is rarely found in the market.

Understanding

Our researchers did extensive study on user’s desire towards neighborhood based search.

• User has understanding that listings in a neighborhood are more likely to have similar features than in a city or zipcode.

• The priority of factors user is looking into varies. Price, school, commute and market trends were brought up frequently. Safety, while most users did not consciously realize, when they were asked, was rated one of the top factors.

Business limitations

Due to industry relations, the company could not simply publish some of data such as demographics. Though some rules have been evolved, the way we could present the data still comes with constraints.

Design

Instead of simply adding a neighborhood level to the existing searching experience, which we believed won’t be too helpful, we created a new tool to enable user to find out neighborhoods by searching city and zipcode.

By surfacing the price trends, schools and crime level, user now is able to systematically look through neighborhoods’ information easily and find out the one matching his/her interests.

Crime level

As I mentioned above, there are business constraints. The crime rate is one example. But also in the consideration that user might be imposed with over concern when seeing an exact crime rate for a neighborhood. I did a re-design to show a range of crime level.

Prototypes

I have delivered a few interactive prototypes with animations.

Map layers

Besides filters, layers on the map view could better help user learn about the neighborhoods geographically from a visual impression. Commute is one example, after all, a lot of these users have daily routines to workplace or kids’ schools.

Adapt to mobile

One of my goals is to translate the desktop web designs to the mobile platforms including mobile web, iOS and Android. Here is an example of the iOS app.

Result

The MVP of Neighborhood Discovery has been released in realtor.com in May 2020.