COMPANY
OJO Labs / movoto.com / Q4 2023
MY ROLE
Director of Product Design; opportunity assessment, discovery, prototype, oversaw ux strategy
TEAMMATES
Design: Mea Bernardo / Product: Pat McLoughlin, Nikhita Singh / Engineering: Kent Czechowski, Conjee, Carlos A.
SUMMARY
Real estate portals such as Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com, etc have been relatively stagnant in differentiating their experiences and leveraging modern ways most people consume information online – most notably, short-form video content. Enter, this “video view” exploration and test for movoto.com resulting in a 50% increase conversion, 2X increase in engagement, and 2X increased page views.
CHALLENGE
- As a homebuyer, I want to view/consume relevant homes quickly
- As a homebuyer, I want to understand the areas and neighborhoods I am searching in
- How might we differentiate ourselves from other home search portals
OUTCOMES
CONCEPT & VISION
To help sell the vision of short-form content to internal stakeholders, we created a clickable prototype that painted an aspirational future with video-based map search, agent video intros, and a community to ask agents questions with video responses. We also entered and won the hack-a-thon which really helped the project’s momentum.
GETTING TO AN ALPHA TEST
Once we received buy-in on the project, we worked towards an alpha test, debating an mvp, focusing on the right content, and the formats of the videos themselves. We tested pseudo videos, which used still images from home detail pages and stitched them together in one market.
HOW WE’D MEASURE SUCCESS
- Increased engagement time / session
- Increased home views / session
- Increased conversion
CONTINUED RESEARCH
While the initial test was running, we did more usability testing, tinkering with formats, functionality, interactions, and content.
INITIAL RESULTS
The initial Alpha tests were promising, so we continued tinkering for a proper Beta test, that would open video views to more markets.
2.5x
Increased engagement time / session
2x
Increased home views / session
50%
Increased engagement time / session
CONTINUED IMPROVEMENTS
We worked with our data science team leveraging generative AI to improve the videos with panning, zooming, tagging images, and aspect ratios.
BETA LAUNCH
We took our previous learnings and tightened up our designs, pushing to a Beta test in a larger market.
THAT'S A WRAP
I left OJO before the completion on this Beta and further launch but the original results from the Alpha were still tracking on the Beta version.
2.5x
Increased engagement time / session
2x
Increased home views / session
50%
Increased engagement time / session
REFLECTIONS
If we could do this all over again, I would run parallel tests on different video content similar to the initial concept – an agent community and agent video introductions. We hypothesized video content was an important differentiator and improvement, but where the content lived and how we got it remained to be seen. If we ran multiple tests, we may have a better sense of the right areas to invest.