Usability – designing for people

OnOneMap.com is a great UK property search web site which raises the bar in its field. Call it a Web2.0 mashup if you must, this uses the excellent Google Maps API to give an expansive search/browse/drag experience which plots property locations right on the map.

The site also offers additional layers of information, including the location of supermarkets, schools and mobile phone masts. Of course OnOneMap just pulls all the data together, so when you click through on a property for details, you end up on the Estate Agent’s site, or another property search site where the experience starts to rapidly degrade.

There are a few sites doing this now, but OnOneMap.com is has been around for a while and is probably the best example of its type. This is a big leap forward in usability and a great tool for finding properties and researching the area. I just hope Estate Agents embrace this kind of initiative and participate fully in it.

Incidentally, I might have picked up on this site earlier if it had a .co.uk domain – I suspect the .com domain made me dismiss it as US-centric.

Why do people leave their £20,000 (or more) car out on the driveway, and lock up their junk in the garage? It is after all, slightly inconvenient to open the garage door – unless it is electrically operated – and drive in, even if it wasn’t full of junk.

Well, it makes sense because these days, cars are more durable – they don’t rust so easily, generally don’t leak when it rains, they start when it’s cold and wet and cannot be stolen in ten seconds with little more than a coat hanger. There was a time when an ungaraged car would rot, leak and in winter, might not start.

So, these days most people don’t really need a garage to store their car in, even if most property buyers would consider it a bonus. Is this why newbuild property developers still add garages, and even worse, make it a prominent architectural feature? Do you live in a property which looks like a garage with a house attached?

What people really need is storage. Not shelves in a garage, but properly designed and integrated storage. Why doesn’t this happen?

When I first started looking at UK property sites in the late 1990’s, I was amazed at how bad they were.

Here we have a well established source of content, a highly active market, and a real need for timely, accurate information on what for most people is by far and away the biggest and most significant purchase they will ever make.

The biggest problem in the early days of Web property sites? Distribution of content – to find a good range of target properties, you had to visit numerous different sites, all of which had uniquely atrocious usability.

Things improved somewhat as information aggregators like Rightmove and Fish4 became property search agents representing numerous Estate Agents to bring as many properties as possible under one site. These sites still had poor usability and you still needed to visit all the main sites to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Have they improved much? Sadly, no. The big property search sites still have bad usability, the content is presented poorly – awful photos, badly formatted text details – and when you click through to the Estate Agent’s web site, they’re usually worse.

Who to blame? Estate Agents need to make their property data more readily available to search sites, improve details and photographs, and everyone needs to make their sites more usable.

So why don’t the best sites move things forward to help raise the bar? Well, it seems that no property search site is particularly outstanding and by the time most people need to hit the property market again, they have forgotten which sites they looked at and what experience they had with them.

Is everyone just getting away with poor standards of service in this sector?