Understanding the User

In order to discover the goals and needs of professional realtors, Sliced Bread Design visited MLSListings users at their jobs. Using an interviewing process called contextual inquiry, we spent two weeks observing six agents prepare client documents, research properties, and use MLSListings and competitor products.

During our investigation, we discovered several key needs that weren’t being addressed. Using the data gathered during our interviews, Sliced Bread Design created an analysis of users’ taskflows and mental models of how things should work. We offered the following recommendations for improvement:

• Integrate all realtor functionality into a single, task-oriented application and interface
• Adopt the model of a dating site by bringing photos to the forefront, creating a more visually captivating experience
• Focus the application on the most important aspect of real estate: location
• Restructure search pages around the most common search fields out of a database of hundreds of fields