Commercial Real Estate
Android app — 2021
With more than 60% of our traffic coming from mobile devices it demonstrates the value of our mobile audience so we saw an opportunity to build our first-ever Android app.
We believe that the app would increase competitiveness and also give us the ability to start playing with push notifications and remind customers about our products and services whenever it makes sense.
It can be a way of staying closer to your customers helping them during the journey of browsing for a property and sending an enquiry.
The opportunity
Bring Android users closer to our product, capture this market and start playing with some features that can only be done with a native app.
We identified that more than 60% of our traffic is coming from mobile devices and it demonstrates the value of our Mobile audience so we saw an opportunity to build an Android app to bring these users closer to our product, capture this market and start playing with some great features that can only be done with a native app.
The goal
Launch our first Android app with all the features we have on our mobile website including MapView and increase enquiries.
MapView presents information about the suburb in a simple, visual way and helps property seekers to identify key information about the location, such as train stations, schools, traffic, etc so we believe that adding this feature to our mobile experience would increase engagement and lead to more Enquiries.
Users outcome
The app can further save users' time by storing their preferences and taking
proactive actions on users' behalf.
Business outcome
The app would attract loyal and high-intent users will be in the app, resulting on a uplift of enquiries.
Validation
To validate our idea, we did a series of user tests. Our main objective was to ensure the navigation was natural and intuitive in the same way they used our mobile website. To measure the effectiveness of our app, we gave them 3 tasks to perform:
We wanted to identify if the user would find the MapView option and analyse how they interacted with this new feature. Another new feature we wanted to validate is the Directions from Google Maps as it's a feature outside of our app, we wanted to understand how users would take turns between the 2 apps.
The last task was about shortlisting. Shortlist helps the user to organize the listings they want to compare and send enquiries. It's also important for us so we can use this data to offer similar properties to them, via email or push notifications.
- Listing View
- Map View
- Listing Detail
- Shortlist
- Loading State
- Shortlist Empty
- Call Agent
- Filter
- Search
- Splash screen
- Log in
- Sign up
Retrospective and learnings
Collaboration was a key part of this project to come to life; however, we faced a bunch of challenges, especially mixing webview components with native components.
Some things just didn't go well together, so we had to rethink and redesign some screens so that it was possible to achieve our goals.
It was very hard to predict before we designed some of the screens, so we had to learn and iterate during the design process. So it ended up taking more time in the design process than we expected but we could make sure all the screens would work properly and the user would have the best experience we could provide.
A snapshot of performance in market so far
In the first month, we’ve seen a steady incremental climb in number of audience instalments, our Daily Active Users, i.e. the number of users who have opened our app on a given day is also steadily increasing. This is a great result, considering the quiet release of the app.
Next steps
The property seeker can now perform all the same actions as the web version but with improved performance.
Once the hiring freeze is over, we hope to launch and improve upon some of our planned features, such as push notifications and targeted content delivery, as we will have the necessary resources to experiment with these new features. You can download the app here.