Product Search in Hong Kong
When I first joined the REA Asia team, I was introduced to team members across the countries. Managing time differences and meeting times and most importantly, I learned about each market.
The consumer behaviour in Asia is vastly different. I had to speak to so many people in different journey, from different countries to try and understand their problem, needs and expectations.
In Hong Kong, everything is fast paced and people have high expectations. People really care about schools. Living in certain locations allow them to apply to certain schools. Cost of housing is also very high due to limited land size.
Research
I went through what research we already have, spent time going through focus group feedback, customer sentiments and internal user interviews. I worked with the designer and product manager in Hong Kong to help run user testing and interviews in the native language.
Pain Points
Hong Kong people has issues with having to type Traditional Chinese. Users mentioned that competitor sites allow them to choose locations from a list and select without typing.
People in Hong Kong want to be able to search for properties by what’s important for them, by schools, transport and deaths.
Families move for schools all the time. Parents generally would try to send their kids to prestigious schools. If you live in certain area, you are allowed to attend certain schools.
Death is important. It’s not part of property search but part of their research. There is a section on our site where deaths in properties is updated regularly. Cause of deaths affect house prices and desirability immensely.
Competitor Analysis
Our competitors in Asia were local and had covered these pain points all along. Some have shortcuts even before users interact with the search input box.
Design
Understanding that a quick search is important and being able to search by point of interest, I quickly drafted a mock to test.
We have “recent searches” as an existing feature, so to preserve it, its showing 2 latest searches followed by the POI (point of interest) search. The recent searches showing are also updated to include POI location. I worked on the flow to see if this could work.
The reason why we don’t provide links below the main search area is because we noticed that people don’t generally scroll down. And as a brand, the search area sits in front of a giant image which is also an ad placement.
I dug a little deeper. School catchment areas are also known as School Net followed by numbers which represents the group of schools. The schools in a school net changes every year, so it was difficult to keep track of them. Perhaps presenting each school based on area would be a good way to search for a property. The mock above, was the early design we tested, we assumed that if users pick a school, they don’t need to have a prior knowledge of which School Net its in.
I managed to reach out to users who are parents in Hong Kong and out of the 5 parents, they were all well aware of the School Net numbers and follow its updates. Another finding was that Hong Kong is small and some schools are close to each other. Properties shown within the 2km radius for school A would also be shown for school B.
So we decided to group them by School Net, the school net data is available through the government site.
