Photos are critical to the home-buying experience. Imagine doing a home search without them! How would you know if a home met your expectations if you couldn’t actually see what it looked like?
At the same time, descriptions contextualize what you see in a photo. It’s helpful to know whether a small room with shelves is a pantry or a walk-in closet or if the ceilings are as high as they appear in the photos. Is that gray countertop granite or quartz? Is the bathroom tile from Home Depot or Italy? These details matter.
In the interest of making it as easy as possible for home buyers to find the homes of their dreams, the For Sale Listing Detail Page (LDP) team at Realtor.com decided to marry photos with text in homebuyers’ search results to provide an augmented gallery experience for browsing and evaluating available homes.
Unique to the industry, this new gallery feature provides a delightful, integrated consumer experience that simplifies and enriches the process of finding a home. Property data provided by the multiple listing services (MLS) is presented in the image gallery, allowing users to see relevant information and understand images in their proper context.
This feature represents the largest surveyed opportunity for increasing preference from our current LDP, specifically for non-Realtor.com users and first-time users. By introducing contextually relevant data to the gallery experience, we can assist users in evaluating whether a home fits their needs.
Research paves the way to innovation.
My design counterpart, Stephanie Embry, and I worked to monitor user behaviors and preferences over time. We observed that consumers quickly scan images to evaluate a potential home. If they like the images, they return to the property details to see if the home meets their criteria. We deduced that if we could display some of the property details alongside the relevant images, we could help consumers understand potential homes better in fewer steps.
Together with research, we conducted a Conjoint analysis with over 400 users in May this year to validate these findings. We presented respondents with a series of improvements to the photo gallery and asked them to indicate which they preferred. Of the options presented, users ultimately preferred to see written details about the photos as they view them — more so than other improvements, like displaying more images at once or viewing one image as large as possible.
What you see – and read – is what you get.
During our research, we received many comments from consumers about better understanding a home’s layout. We hoped that by combining the MLS details with the photos, we could enhance their experience and make it quicker and easier to find their dream home.
In the new augmented gallery experience, when a user opens the photo gallery and clicks on an image category – for example, Exterior, Bathrooms, Bedrooms, etc. – property details related to that image category appear next to the appropriate image. To do this, the machine learning team trained a computer vision model to generate classification tags for images that categorize images received by room type. We then mapped content provided by MLSs for the room types to those image categories. Three lines of text are displayed along with a “Show more” button, which users can click for more information:
So far, the feedback about the new augmented gallery feature has been extremely positive. One user said, “I like the extra details on flooring and amenities with the photos because now I don’t have to guess or figure out where else to find that information.” Another had a similar positive experience: “Seeing room details and amenities together helps me visualize the room before requesting a tour. I don’t have to go between pages to determine which pictures correspond to the details listed.”
What’s Next?
We expect the augmented gallery feature to increase engagement with the gallery by bringing more utility to consumers where they are instead of asking them to take additional steps to find the information they want. Historically, improvements that benefit most of our consumers, such as gallery improvements, have also boosted New User Lead Submission Rates, which helps us confirm the value we are delivering.
Currently, we’re also working with multiple teams on developing the ability for users to search by room and find homes that have rooms with similar features via a machine learning (ML) visual similarity model. For example, if a homebuyer sees a kitchen they love on a listing, they can now discover similar kitchens nearby. We’re excited about the learning this ML feature will give us in terms of understanding how different types of consumers weigh visual similarity versus other aspects of a property, such as price, distance, and bedroom counts.
Meanwhile, we’ll continue to track user behavior to determine the efficacy of the augmented gallery feature. What we discover will help us decide whether to expand the feature and what content is most beneficial for each category.
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