I led the rapid creation of an augmented reality feature to defend against emerging market competition and improve customer perception of the StreetEasy search experience.
An Emerging Competitor
StreetEasy learned that a well-funded competitor was preparing to enter the NYC market and planned to partner with long-time rivals to challenge StreetEasy’s dominance in NYC real estate search. It’s critical to the health of StreetEasy as a marketplace to have “all the audience” and “all the listings.”
A Differentiating Feature
The competitor’s national market app had a defining feature: “snap a home for info.” It was likely that they would roll out a similar feature for NYC and that such a feature would be part of their launch publicity. If StreetEasy could launch a similar feature, the effect of any launch publicity could be limited.
Additionally, in a recent customer sentiment survey, users reported that the StreetEasy search experience was effective, but felt a bit dated. Rolling out a state-of-the-art search feature could help shift that perception and mitigate related threats to audience share.
Imitate or Innovate?
In strategic discussions with product and engineering, there was a proposal to build something similar to the “snap for info” feature. I had tested the competitor’s feature extensively and was unimpressed. Plus, this feature was best suited for single-family homes, not NYC’s “vertical living” housing stock. I also knew that we had successfully built an augmented reality prototype in a recent hack week. I persuaded the group that we should pursue an AR feature as it would be unique, more contemporary, and better suited to NYC.
Creating Clear Success Criteria
In these discussions, I pressed for alignment on clear success criteria. AR is an exciting technology so I knew a lot of people would want to be involved and they would all have a lot of ideas to share. However, this project was time sensitive. To avoid spending time in areas that wouldn’t directly address the challenge at hand, I proposed 3 success criteria to guide the project team:
The feature must launch by our target date
It must offer a delightful user experience
It must generate positive publicity
An Accelerated Process
In short-timeline projects, there can be pressure to dive in and abandon the design process, often leading to churn and loss of valuable time and lower quality output. However, the product design process that I had built included an early assessment stage to identify the most impactful design activities possible within given time constraints. I assigned a designer and worked with them on the design plan. One of the first activities was to create a storyboard that described the experience we wanted to create in concrete terms. This enabled all involved to quickly align on a clear vision and accelerated the conversations that followed.
A storyboard allowed to align quickly and get to work with confidence
Maintaining Focus
I sourced and secured funding for a freelance 3D artist to create the 3D markers. I then provided creative direction for the markers and made sure all stakeholders were kept in the loop, while keeping the team focused on designing and building. I kept our success criteria front and center to help maintain that focus. A lot of great ideas were captured in a "parking lot" for future consideration as we stayed dialed in to our three goals.
Testing the Concept Quickly
This project was unique and required new ways of testing, especially if we were going to deliver on the “delightful experience” goal. I took to the streets with an early prototype to identify and document experience issues. Some of the challenges included the frequency of on-market listings in a given area, marker legibility, and spatial challenges presented by street and building corners as well wider-than-usual streets. It was also a chance to see firsthand what it was like to use the feature on the streets of New York. Would it cause excessive or unsafe distraction in such a fast-paced environment?
We recruited testing volunteers from across the company to find and document bugs and observations, as well. The PM compiled a list of bugs, but Design kept a separate list of experience issues… all with an eye on goal #2: It must offer a delightful user experience.
Mission Accomplished
We were able to address all of the major experience issues and launch on time. We achieved the press coverage and social media buzz we were hoping for. All three goals were met and we were proud of what we created.
Future Iteration
With the goals accomplished, we monitored and analyzed performance. We identified some interesting drop-off points in the onboarding process and addressed them. We also changed the interaction pattern to decrease its prominence to an appropriate level for the long term, retiring the floating action button in favor of an inline card on the home screen. And there is a long backlog of ideas ready for the time when further development supports business goals.
Decreasing prominence to a more appropriate level after the initial launch period
