An Usability Study On Real Estate Site Search

Currently, due to the rapid development of the network technology and the characteristics of the real estate industry itself, the real estate networking has emerged, and many real estate Web sites have established. Real estate web site is informative, interactive, convenient, resource sharing, but at the same time, these characteristics are also brought to the site's using some inconvenience. In particular, in the process of the searching, a part of the user's search efficiency is not high, and even the searching behavior of some users will be met with failures. Usability issues about search like this make users suffer a serious setback, and greatly affect the user's search experience. However, search is one of the main purposes of the user using real estate web site, and its usability affect the usability of the entire site. Therefore, the study takes SouFun as object of it, adopts a series of usability engineering methods, and starts a real estate professional site's search usability study.This paper consists of four parts: 1. Make document research about search usability's concept, importance and status, and put forward the difference between search engine optimization and search usability optimization. 2. Take SouFun for an example, make investigation and study about the real estate professional site users'behavior and search needs. Combning quantitative research methods with qualitative research methods, found the gap between that existing search design and user needs through questionnaires and eye movement study. Specifically as follows: (1) it lacks function or information (user demand is high). (2) unnecessary (user needs very low) or duplicate the functions or information, such as "saving conditions" function, "purchase circles" and "characteristic building" items are the content that most users don't need. (3) named inaccurate or unclear, it is difficult to understand for the user. (4) Interactive mode is inconsistent with users'expectations. In addition, according to the results of eye movement research, users'browse pattern in the list page has three kinds: (1) "F" type of browsing. (2) "L" type browsing. (3) Inverted "L"type of browsing. 3. From the design point of view, using empirical evaluation and competitive analysis methods, identify and analyze the existing SouFun search system's usability issues. At last, summarize usability guidelines that are suitable for all real estate professional website. 4. Draw the user participatory design ideas, determine the solution together with users, and then prototype and confirm it through usability testing. At last, list some usability problems still exist in the prototype. Finally, according to the research results, the paper tries to put forward the development trend of real estate professional website search.