Usability Hell, Adventures in Renting

17 Jan

For me and My Man (I’ve been banned from calling him The Boy), 2009 was the year of lettings websites. We must have looked at hundreds of properties on sites ranging from irritating to completely unusable, and never managed to find a single site that did it all. Local or national companies, it made no difference. They all sucked!

The internet is the perfect medium for house-hunting. You can see more information than in a newspaper ad and view endless images (provided the agent has actually taken some). It should be an enjoyable experience, but it’s not.

Both being webby types, of course, there was much discussion over “this form is quite nice, shame about the results” as well as “this place is a bit more expensive, but look the walls are painted green!”. This inevitably led to the conclusion that if we ever got the opportunity, we would build the best property lettings/sales website in the entire world.

“They can’t be that bad” I hear you cry, “She’s exaggerating!”. You think so? Read on for some examples that may very well give you nightmares.

Our Search Form Criteria

Must actually work
Lets us specify ranges for price and bedrooms, rather than just “1 bed or more”
If there are a lot of options for example for choosing areas, give us a “select all” checkbox
Let us choose property type/at least filter out flatshares

Our Results Page Criteria

A flatshare with 19 students is not a one bedroom flat
Let us sort the results by price etc
Prices shown should be accurate
Show how many photos are available for the property (this gets important when you’ve just opened 20 flats in new tabs only to find they have 0 piccies that aren’t the external one you just saw)

Our Property Page Criteria

Clicking on photos should enlarge them
Let us view property location on a map (Google Maps is free you know)
Give room measurements
We’re on the internet, give us a link to email enquiries
A scanned page from your brochure does not count as a web page
Tell us when the property is available

You’d think these would be common sense and at least the majority of them would apply to every website. After all, there’s no point having a site that people can’t use. Well…you’d be surprised…

Pattinson

Arguably the most popular agent in the region, they also have one of the worst sites. The map-based area selection is actually quite nifty, unfortunately the search criteria form itself is not (see image at top of post). We see the all too common “minimum bedrooms” option here, and no way to specify a maximum, resulting in the dreaded flatshares intermingling with our real results and me throwing my cup of tea at a wall.

When we get to the results page, they’re automatically ordered by price, high to low, with no way of changing this. I imagine we weren’t alone in skipping to the last page and working backwards through the list in case of lurking deals. The titles don’t link to the property page, as a lot of internet users would expect, and while we can view the location on a map from this page, once clicking through to read more details we cannot.

The final insult? While (some of the) images will enlarge when clicked upon, the image resizing script is completely useless and only shows a portion of the original image. *sigh*

Reeds Rains

This time it’s a popular national company, and they have an even worse site than Pattinson. For starters, typing in the url takes you to their sales site, and woe betide you if you enter anything into the search form before realising you want lettings. No, not content with giving you a buy/rent option on the form itself Reeds Rains require you visit a differently coloured part of the site and lose any info you’ve already typed in. Ok, let’s start again then.

On the bright side, the search allows you to specify a range of prices. On the downside…everything else. You must decide precisely how many bedrooms you’re looking for, and whether you’re looking for property exactly one mile from your chosen location or not. Never mind, the results page will make it all better, right?

Maybe not. Once again there is no option to sort the results. Once again the property title does not link to it’s page. There is some concession to modernity with the broadband test option, and there’s a perfectly serviceable lightbox effect to view images, but by this point I’m too annoyed to award any points for that. I should also note that while there is an option to send in an enquiry by email, the twice I’ve tried this resulted in no reply.

Globrix

Globrix is evil. Actually no, Globrix is quite good really but needs a bit of refining. I should point out that this is not a letting agency, but an aggregation site pulling listings from other sites.

At first the casual browser is stunned by the fact that it looks decent and uses such voodoo as Ajax and sliders. As the novelty fades, however, we have all the usual problems. While the search itself is wonderful, even including such options as “pets allowed”, they’re often inaccurate. Properties tagged with the aforementioned option will often include “no pets” in the description, so it leaves me wondering where Globrix got their information. The majority of listings will only feature one external shot forcing you to click through to the agency site for more, and of course this opens in a new tab by default. I have enough tabs open at one time already, thanks very much.

There are a lot of good things to be said for this site, the search results can be manipulated every which way and there’s even an option to email every agent in your results. However all of this is overshadowed by one very important point. Despite the fact that you can search for only flatshares, it appears to be impossible to search for everything but flatshares. There’s no indication given that the 2 bed flat that seems a resonable price is actually twice the price and inhabited until you click through to read the full description. Damn you, Globrix.

Ok those are bad

There were many more sites involved in last year’s househunt, but most had the same problems. A notable exception is Andrew Craig which until recently did not actually have property pages. Instead the viewer was presented with a scanned copy of those pages they stick in the shop window, thus neatly avoiding giving the site any purpose at all. Fortunately they have added a picture gallery for each property, however this is seperate to the aforementioned “details sheet” which is still totally unclickable. Well done, guys.

In conclusion, if you’re building one of these sites you should probably just ignore the competition and start from scratch, your users will thank you. After some bad experiences with Pattinson viewings, including being shown around by a representative unable to answer such questions as “will this bathroom actually be finished?”, we went and advertised on Gumtree where we found our current happy home. Hooray!