March 23rd, 2009

Form & Function: Continuing the Debate of UI vs. Functionality

By Robert Hahn - VP, Marketing

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

-Louis Sullivan

At a panel discussion I moderated recently at RE Tech South on “The Future of Real Estate Search”, a very interesting point was made by the assembled panelists.  (And it was a rockstar-filled panel: Corey Kozlowski of Diverse Solutions, Rudy Bachraty of Trulia, Andrew Tillman of Center for Realtor Technology, Greg Tracy of Blueroof.com, Dan Woolley of Dwellicious, and David Carroll or softRealty.com)

The question was whether UI (user interface/design) is more important than Functionality (the actual search logic/behavior).  The panelists were nearly unanimous in saying that UI > Functionality.

Greg Robertson of Dwellicious followed up on Twitter with an excellent observation:

@robhahn asks at #RETS would you tell agents to spend more money on a web designer(UI) or a programmer to improve search. Panel says UI.  If panelist agree UI is more important than search then it doesn’t bode well for @robhahn (OnBoard) lifestyle neighborhood search.

Because we were so limited on time (30 minutes to get a discussion with six panelists?) I really didn’t have the chance to get that discussion going.  But that’s what blogs are for, right?

I made a semi-serious point to Greg via Twitter that it wasn’t whether panelists agreed that UI > Functionality that bodes ill for our Lifestyle Listings Engine, but whether they were right or not.  I’m going to argue (surprise!) that actually, functionality trumps user interface when it comes to foundational enabling technology.

Form Follows Function!

Form Follows Function: We All Agree!

The principle that form follows function has been a cornerstone of modern architecture and design for over a hundred years (Sullivan wrote his manifesto in 1896).  And it has been adapted in large part into the art and science of user interface design.

In fact, the entire notion of “user interface design” is premised upon using visual, audio, and textual cues to help a user accomplish something.  Otherwise, it would simply be called “graphic design”.

And I think Greg Robertson would agree with that.  Design is not how something looks, but how it works.

The real question then, is not whether UI/design should be divorced from functionality for the sake of satisfying some designer’s creative urge, (and to be fair, none of the panelists were making this claim) but which takes priority for the real estate web: user interface design or functionality.

On Priority: Argument for Why UI > Function

The strongest argument that UI trumps functionality is that the greatest functionality in the world doesn’t mean jack if it’s hidden behind crappy UI.  If folks can’t figure out how to use a thing, then it don’t much matter what that thing can do.

For example, take a look at this:

Powerful! If you know how to use it...

This is a tool for building and executing SQL queries.  Given any set of real estate data — including listings data — the functionality of a tool like this is enormous.  You can probably find whatever property you may be looking for, narrow down results quickly, and so on.

But it is safe to say that a real estate search site that simply puts a SQL query front-end as its “Find a Property” interface will fail miserably.  Unless you have a specialized practice catering only to database administrators.  In which case you’re probably going to be out of business soon enough.

In today’s real estate world, what determines success or failure is user interface design.  Companies like Trulia, Blueroof, Diverse Solutions, and softRealty spend thousands of manhours and millions of dollars creating compelling user experience for search.  That these websites hold a competitive advantage over a poorly designed site is readily demonstrated by traffic analysis or simply by putting a consumer in front of a computer.

(It should also be mentioned that far too few brokerages and agents pay enough attention to UI design.  Greg Tracy said, after reviewing a circa-1997 website, that it looked a lot like most realtor websites in 2009.)

Functionality vs. Enabling Technology

On the other hand, there is a distinction to be drawn between “functionality” and “enabling technology” — what one might call a foundational functionality.

For example, Adobe Flash is enabling technology.  It enables all manner of other functionality.  Things that could only be dreamt of before that technology is introduced are now made possible.

Google Maps is also arguably foundational functionality, because it expands the universe of what is possible.  It seems to me that the introduction of Housingmaps.com by Paul Rademacher in 2005 was the seminal breakthrough for real estate web.  (In fact, Housingmaps.com may have been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 fire.)

The Original: Housingmaps.com, which triggered Real Estate Web 2.0

After Google Maps (and Housingmaps.com), it seemed that you could not design a real estate website without incorporating listings with a map display.  All of the second-generation real estate websites of today owe a huge debt to the original Housingmaps.com and to Google Maps.

The key point here is that design, and user interface, naturally followed these foundational functionalities.  Once the enabling technology made it possible to put listings information right on top of a graphical map, the user interface had to adapt to make that possible.  Search boxes shrank in size, moved to the margins, etc. in order to accommodate the screen real estate of a map.  Designers began to put links into the pop-up bubbles, and map-based search began to make an appearance.

At the same time, however, as Dan Woolley of Dwellicious mentioned on the panel itself, while visualization of search results took a giant leap forward with the introduction of mapping, the property search itself hasn’t changed very much since the earliest days of the real estate web.  We are still living in the Zip/Bed/Bath world for the most part — map-based search is the sole exception.

Whether it is Realtor.com of 1996 or Trulia of 2009, the paradigm of search itself has not changed much: property features/characteristics within a geographical boundary.

That paradigm is what we have set out to change with Lifestyle Listings Engine (LLE).

Enabling Functionality

Our view is that if we are successful with LLE, we will enable a range of new functionality that is currently unavailable on the real estate web.  And that this new set of functionality is something that consumers are hungry for.

The theory — which we are testing, by the way — is that when people go to perform a property search online, they are actually not looking for a “3BR, 2BA house in 07054 under $700K”.  Our theory is that what people are actually looking for is something like: “Someplace with enough space for the kids, with good schools, that we can afford on my husband’s salary… and boy, it’d be nice if there were some decent restaurants nearby.”

In conversation after conversation — and now, in focus group session after focus group session — we are finding that consumers have a picture in their head of what they want.  Usually, these pictures are very hazy.  It takes time and a good deal of research to go from hazy desires to defined set of criteria like “3BR, 2BA, $700K in 07054″.  The process is filled with frustration, dead-ends in research, and a real sense of powerlessness on the part of consumers.

We think that consumers would use a tool that can more directly translate what is in their heads to results on a webpage.  We believe that this functionality will drive a new period of real innovation in the real estate web.  We think that talented developers and designers within real estate can’t wait to get their hands on a new toolset that will help them deliver new ways to answer consumer questions.  LLE is not, in my opinion, “lifestyle search”; rather, it makes “lifestyle search” possible.

That will require excellent user interface design.  Just as the introduction of mapping (and related GIS concepts) to real estate brought forth a new generation of user interface design, I believe that “lifestyle search” will change the user interface in fundamental ways.

I don’t know what that UI will be.  Is it a single-field natural language search, like Google’s?  Is it a set of dials and levers and sliders, similar to Kayak?  Who knows?  But I do know this:

That UI will follow function.

This is the law.

-rsh

Tags: Google Maps, housingmaps.com, Lifestyle Listings Engine, property search, real estate web, search, user interface design, web 2.0.

December 17th, 2008

Real Estate Wetware 2.0

By Robert Hahn - VP, Marketing

As we wind down Real Estate’s Annus Horribilis, and look forward to 2009, I am struck by a wholly unreasonable sense of optimism.

Some experts are predicting that if 2008 was the Year of Horrors for the markets, then 2009 will be the Year of Horrors for the overall economy. But I work in the real estate industry. The problems of the economy and the markets began with us, a couple of years back, and I feel that we’ve already suffered through the worst.

But even if that were not true, and 2009 ends up being the worst real estate market since Thag traded his warm cave to Konk for two woolly mammoth cloaks (with Dhool taking a commission for helping Thag market his cave), I can’t help but feel that 2009 will present the industry, Onboard Informatics, and our customers with enormous opportunities.

Part of the reason is that we have some new products in waiting that I can’t wait to announce and discuss with the industry. But the larger part, frankly, is that I feel that this downturn, this crisis, comes at a perfect time.

Although the Internet was introduced to the public sometime in late 90′s, the real estate industry hasn’t fully embraced technology until the last few years. While there are many who might take issue with the claim that the industry has embraced technology, I urge them to take a wider view. Today, you can’t find a broker, an agent, a manager who isn’t thinking about technology, thinking about the Internet, thinking about websites, blogs, Twitter, social networks, etc.

Mere four years ago, when I first proposed to Coldwell Banker that it should launch a blog, the suggestion was met with Legal Department’s version of “BWAHAHAHAHA!” while pointing fingers and such. Today, Colbert Coldwell has a Facebook profile.

The industry has definitely opened the Pandora’s Box that is technology. In some cases, it took third parties such as Homegain, Trulia, Move, Zillow, Google, and Microsoft to provide the leadership, and for that alone, those pioneers deserve our thanks. But whether the industry charged ahead, or was dragged screaming into the 21st century, there is little doubt in my mind that we are here now.

The embracing of technology also coincided with the longest and largest boom cycle in the history of real estate. We now know that much of that was fueled with what one might call not just stupid money, but dumbass money. Nonetheless, while the going was good, there’s no denying that we were awash in easy money. Truly suspect business models were tried, because it looked like everything was just going up, up and away.

The downturn, then, is the first real challenge to the newly empowered real estate industry. We now have access to technology and tools that would have sounded like fantastic science fiction a mere decade ago. Computers and telecommunications have absolutely revolutionized how work is done on a day-to-day basis. And now, the storm has come.

The Next Innovation

Thanks to the computer and telecommunications equipment industries, we have had an explosion of innovation in hardware. My cellphone has five times more memory than my first desktop’s hard drive that weighed about 10lbs. My little laptop has more processing power than the computer that sent Apollo 11 to the moon and brought it back. In every conceivable way, improvements in hardware have been nothing short of sci-fi.

Companies both in and out of real estate have created tremendous innovation in software. Databases of today make the cutting-edge databases of just ten years ago seem like a batch of old index cards. AJAX, Flash, mapping software, instant messaging, mobile applications… the innovators working in software have been hard at work to continually improve user experience, efficiency, and speed.

And I have no doubt that both hardware manufacturers and software programmers will be hard at work to give us things we can only dream about. I happen to think that Onboard Informatics will be in that conversation, but that might be hopeful, wishful thinking. Time will tell.

But one thing I do believe is that neither hardware nor software will provide the real estate industry with the next big leap in innovation. No, the next innovation will come from upgrades in wetware, otherwise known as human beings.

Real Estate Wetware 2.0

Real Estate Wetware 2.0
The prognosticators in Real Estate talk alot about Web 2.0, about Real Estate 2.0, and social media and so on. But so much of the conversation feels empty, feels too ‘technical’. I believe it is because we rarely talk much about the people who will be operating the software on the advanced hardware platforms.

As we, at Onboard, have been strategizing about 2009 and beyond, something that struck all of us with its obviousness was that for the past six years, we have not actually been in the “data business” as much as we have been in the “humanizing” business. Marc Siden, the CEO of Onboard, recently discussed this in a video.

As a result, we have decided that our message, our theme for 2009 is the “Human Touch”. Real Estate websites of today lack the human touch, being entirely too property-centric. Few of them are able to answer real human questions and concerns of real human beings. We think our clients do better than most, of course, but even they can do better, and we are committed to helping them continually improve with new and improved tools, new and improved data, and new and improved services.

At the same time, there is a real danger that this focus on “humanizing” the real estate web could become too externally directed. Studies by NAR, for example, tend to focus on buyers and sellers of real estate. We think a whole lot about the consumer, the user experience, and how to make connections with consumers.

Thing is… even though information and advanced technology can humanize the web, at the end of the day, it takes a human being to actually relate to a human being.

This is one reason why we have never subscribed to theories about disintermediation. The real estate agent will never be completely replaced by algorithms and super-powered computers. A diligent consumer can research neighborhoods, get all manner of info, find homes online, and do all of those things… understand which school systems offer the best value, know how safe an area is for her family and so on, but at the end of the day, a website can no more relate to her than I could feel my iPod’s pain when forced to play the Backstreet Boys.

While manufacturers could continuously improve hardware, and software giants could continually give us programs that astonish, neither with much involvement from the real estate industry, the improvement of wetware, of the human professionals who make this industry what it is, simply cannot be done by outsiders or third parties.

That is a task for brokers, for agents, for REALTOR associations, for franchisors, for technology providers… in short, for all of us.

Dell can provide the latest quad-core Xeon servers. Google and Microsoft can provide the latest in mapping technology. We at Onboard can provide you the latest and most accurate information to humanize your website and your tools. But without upgrading your wetware, your people, to take advantage of the new power that technology unleashes, none of that will be of much use.

And the current market conditions will provide the perfect test. Just as a company in today’s market operating on old IBM 486 machines, or running a circa-1998 website, cannot expect to compete and survive, a company that is operating outdated wetware cannot compete against one that has trained its people to take advantage of new technology, new data, and new methodologies.

We’ll do our part — deliver you the best data and content in the industry, and some of the finest technology tools and guidance to implement them. But we need you to do your part, especially in these troubled economic times.

The next innovation breakthrough will come from Real Estate Wetware 2.0.

-rsh

Tags: human touch, web 2.0, wetware.