Designing for Returning Visitors in Real Estate
We often talk about ways of increasing traffic on our website and often forgot to treat the returning visitor (Many good brands have started doing it now) in a different way. For a website, returning visitors are very important as they are not only loyal visitors but also they are one of the brand ambassadors for your product. As the positive word of mouth from them may attract a lot of other visitors which will actually save a lot of money spent to attract new visitors.
How we should treat them
We should always welcome our returning visitor with a “recognition and recall” factor. (For e.g. Hello User, Continue with your last search or you were the last searching for XYZ on our platform, or Hello Mr. XYZ, we’ve some recommendation for you based on your last search).
They should always feel connected with your website and don’t have to start their search from scratch. It also gives a positive impact on the Brand who cares about their customers.
It’s very important to do the right things at the right time for real users. Engage your repeat users by showing unique and relevant content and suggest him contextual choices which will help in minimizing the cognitive load of a user.
As a UX designer, we should also focus on how to delight our users not only by interaction but also by providing useful and meaningful information architecture.
The Project
Design for Returning Visitor — PropTiger.com
Since the experience for returning visitor on our platform never exist earlier so it was like a newbie for us to design. Because of its non-existence, our returning users often feel like lost and disconnected with the brand whenever they visited our homepage, so we thought of designing a different experience for our returning visitors where they can feel connected and as a brand, we can help them in achieving their goals.
I as a UX designer for Proptiger.com designed the homepage experience for Returning visitors on our website which actually helped in improving the conversion and engagement numbers from the homepage from a business perspective and added a delightful experience from user’s point of view.
The approach
We started with the user research and understanding their needs when they come to our platform as a returning user. We discovered that PropTiger’s USP which is providing an end to end services in the buying journey (From Search to Buy and post-sales services) is something they feel useful and that’s what excites them.
So we created a buying journey for our users to see where they exactly are and what’s the next step to be taken. Please see the pic below.
So the next time user will land on the homepage after shortlisting any of the project either form recently viewed or anywhere, he’ll be seeing the next step opened in buying journey.
Understanding of Search Behavior in Real Estate
From the above reference pic, you can understand that there is a funnel of a search pattern and user behavior in the Property Search, but the behavior is completely different in case of a returning visitor.
So we created the architecture for returning visitor as the reverse funnel where we know the kind of project user is interested in his last visit and accordingly we’ll show other similar projects as per his preference.
Now if user scrolls down further (that means he is trying or explicitly want to move out of the funnel and we should help him in showing the kind of content that will cater to his needs instead of restricting him with the same content or pushed enquiry form) and broaden his search so will start showing the collection of projects he might be interested in and on a next scroll we’ll show him the best of the developers in his preferred and nearby localities.
To make you understand this would be the IA for returning visitor
- Continue with his previous search
- On scroll down — Show User his buying journey
- On 3rd Scroll — Politely forced him to connect with an agent
as we can understand he’s moving out of the funnel so better offer him a help upfront. - on 4th Scroll — Show more relevant and trending project and collection of projects in the locality
There the intent should be to offer more relevant projects from that locality but still let him move out of the funnel and give him full control. - The last Scroll — Show Best of the builders and Offer contextual content of his interest
The Final Design
Mobile Design
Please go through the live design at www.proptiger.com and share feedback (the homepage for repeat visitor will only be available after you’ll explore some of the projects and again come back as a returning visitor).