In the first part of this series, we met Will, a first time home buyer. I found Will through a snowball sampling technique. While I was attending the Hampton Roads Homes Show, I interviewed several vendors working the show who were fans and users of products and mobile search apps. I asked them if they could put me in touch with acquaintances who were looking for a home, whether to rent or buy. Will was a first time home buyer who was willing to sit down with me.

So, even though we didn’t use a random sampling technique, it still turned out that Will and his family were fairly typical of first time home buyers in terms of demographics.

In terms of how they actually look for a home, Will and his wife Kyla share a home laptop to organize most of their home searches. They also supplement the search with their smartphones, with Will doing most of the search with the phone because Kyla has less time. We also learned that what Will and Kyla want most of all is to:

• feel in control of the process, with a road map or guide to the home buying process
• come away from the online process feeling knowledgeable

Understanding the emotional journey

I talked with Will about the home buying process and I also watched as him as he searched for homes, both on our site as well as on competitor sites. Doing so, I learned about some of Will’s desires, needs, fears, and problems. Home buying isn’t only a rational process of weighing costs and benefits, punching numbers in calculators, and making abstract decisions about property values and affordability. Instead, it’s also an emotional journey. New home buyers talk animatedly about their dreams, desires, and even fears.

Desires

• Knowledge: As I mentioned earlier, Will wants to feel knowledgeable about searching for a home. He wants to feel that he’s learning something about the housing market, homes, financial planning, and preparing his finances for a major purchase. He feels especially warm toward sites that offer him tools to help him with his search.
• Value: Both Will and Kyla want a good deal. Everyone wants a good deal on a home, of course. But being young, on a lmited budget, and starting out, they feel pressure to make sure that they aren’t making a rash decision. They see the home as an investment, but it’s one they have to live in so they can’t afford to buy more home than they need.
• Location: Like most home buyers, they have in mind certain locations: they want to be in neighborhoods that they believe friends and family will also like and approve of. Since they have children, they are also want a neighborhood in a good school district.
• Ease: When searching, they are looking for a way to get the best results that are customized to their needs. They want custom results, but they don’t want them tailored at the expense of weeding out good deals.
• Personal Agent: Exposure to real estate buying shows on HGTV and TLC have created an audience with high expectations of real estate agents. Both Will and Kyla often talk about wanting to have an experience like the one they see on shows like Property Virgins. They both often talk about how they wan to be able to enter their requirements into a program that will spit back the perfect set of 20 listings to evaluate.

Fears

• Regret: Will is also motivated by fears such as the antipatory fear that he will miss out or lose out on that one great deal. One story Will tells when he’s trying to explain this is the feeling he has when searching for the best plane fare. There are so many choices and options, and he’s always hearing about great deals someone else got. Sometimes, he feels like he gets sucked into an endless search for the perfect bargain dream home, just as he feels duped into searching for that $99 plane fare but never finds it.
• Financial fears:: Will is afraid of getting stuck with a money pit. He’s worried that he might not know enough to find all the problems with a house. He’s heard horror stories from friends or heard them retold on home renovation shows like Holmes Inspection on HGTV.
• Irrational desires/emotions: Will is also afraid of being overwhelmed by irrational desires. Part of that fear drives him to stick with home search portals. He uses the sites to gather knowledge and avoids contacting any agents until he feels he’as knowledgeable enough to protect himself from strong sales pitches.
• Ignorance: Will also fears that his lack of knowledge about homes, the market, and the home buying process will put them at a disadvantage. He worries that he won’t know enough to tell a good house from a bad one. But he also worries that he is lacking on-the-ground knowledge such as good school districts or good neighborhoods. Sometimes, his fears are of getting involved in the buying process only to be upended by a “gotch” he hadn’t anticipated.

These more abstract desires and fears also manifest themselves in the concrete ways Will interacts with the real estate search sites he showed me. These issues fall into a hand full of categories, to wit:

Issues of trust

• Talking to friends and co-workers, he sometimes hears about homes that are for sale, but doesn’t always find them in a search
• Kyla called about some homes, only to learn that they were no longer on the market.
• Kyla felt she was ignored by some agents. She submitted requests for more information but never heard from agents. Or, sometimes she learned that a house was sold or off the market.
• Will wonders if he’s getting the best results.
• Uses multiple sites as check on the information he’s seeing. Concerned that information is supressed

No one site has it all

• Feels the real estate search sites have different qualities. Uses several to piece together information.
• Uses Trulia because he trusts their home value pricing the most.
• Uses Homes search portals because he prefers the home value search functionality.
• Dislikes having to use multiple sites.
• Would prefer a single source for the homes search. But also concerned vendors use paid listings> He wonders if the ads he sees are because their sponsored by brokers with the deepest pockets, rather than being the results that best match his search.
• Uses Nancy Chandler.com to search by school. He doesn’t like how klunky the search is, but it is superior to anything else that’s online. At Nancychandler.com, he can search by high school, middle school, and elementary school district.

Trouble using search

• Find it difficult to keep straight all the different homes that he’s seen.
• Uses the My Homes and favorites features, but feels it’s old-fashioned looking.
• Assumes an outdated UI means that no one take care of the site. Worries that he’ll lose his saved listings. Always sends backups by email.
• Initially frustrated with the lack of way to reformulate a search without returning to the home page.
• Unhappy with current options for narrowing searches: would like to narrow by neighborhood, as well as search within a radius of an address or landmark.

Major Themes

We came across some major themes in talking with Will and Kyla. Below, we’ll illustrate each theme with a pertinent quote from Will.

Put me in control

Make it easy

Make me feel smart

Since Will and Kyla have problems common to others, we can look to a large body of research on the search experience to guide us in coming up with solutions to address Will and Kyla’s needs. We’ll discuss these issues in a follow up presentation, part three in our series, on designing for the search experience.

Resources

You can learn more in the research archives or view a copy of the slide deck from the presentation of findings last week and at the local IT conference, DevCon.