For my Cal State Fullerton User Experience and Customer-Centered Design class (Fall 2019), our team of three was asked to select a group of people to test and a topic. From our testing, we were tasked with developing personas.
We chose to test the usefulness of popular real estate apps and site like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin. Zillow is the leader in this category, followed by Trulia, Yahoo! Homes, Realtor.com and Redfin (January 2019 data). The U.S. residential real estate market is approximately $27 trillion.
We wanted to find out how helpful both current homeowners and those who want to buy a home in the near future find these sites and apps.
STEP 1: INTERVIEWING USERS
The goal of these interviews is to learn about the research habits and experience of people looking online or via an app to purchase a home, including what they find most valuable in a real estate site or app. Research questions we hope to answer include:
· What are house-hunters specifically looking for when they consult a real estate site or app?
· What features do they want (or would they want) a site/app to include?
· How do house-hunters filter/narrow their search to find what they want? (This can include offline tools, such as relying on a realtor, getting recommendations of neighborhoods from friends, etc.)
· If the tester has used a real estate app/site before, why did they choose that site/app?
· Did the app/site meet their expectations and needs? If not, how so?
· Do they do any research offline in addition to using sites/apps, or would they (for first-time
home buyers)?
In answering these questions, we were able to develop personas that deeply understand the needs of specific types of home buyers.
STEP 2: ANALYZING INTERVIEW FINDINGS
We interviewed nine people in person in their home or office setting or by phone. All interviews were done individually, with one tester and one interviewer. All interviews were completed in September 2019 and took about 20 to 30 minutes each.
The nine participants were a mix of co-workers, friends, and family (i.e., people known to the interviewers) and all are located in Southern California. (Attached are the full findings for all interviewees.)
Our team created an affinity diagram to group the findings from our nine participants against various attributes to find relationships and possible correlations.
Click to expand: Affinity mapping for homebuyer personas
STEP 3: CREATING PERSONAS
Once we’d created affinities through our mapping exercise, we were ready to create the primary persona for our house hunters. Our research also identified a secondary persona and two supplementary personas.