Improving the experience of digitally shopping for a new home
Taylor Morrison
As a Product Designer for Taylor Morrison, a Fortune 500 homebuilder, I worked on improving the digital site map to enhance how users explore, discover, and purchase their new home. Role: Product Designer (project lead) Time Frame: Summer 2024 (8 weeks) Methods: User Testing, Prototyping Tools: Figma, Usertesting.com
Background
The digital site map is an interactive tool that customers and sales team members use to visualize the layout of available homes and lots in a Taylor Morrison community. The primary goal of the site map is to give users an understanding of homes in a community, and eventually drive users to the reservation system, where they can reserve their preferred home.
Problem
Enhancing the sitemap was an ongoing project, but two specific UX challenges were prioritized during this time frame:
How might we... bridge the gap between the website and the reservation system? Users found different information depending on whether they were browsing on the website vs. exploring on the site map. How could we make this experience more seamless?
How might we... simplify the user interface to prioritize information that is valuable to the users? Previous user tests showed that some users found the interface to be overwhelming and cluttered - we wanted to see how to simplify the interaction by prioritizing valuable information.
Defining the problem
The following tools were used to gain a deeper understanding of how to simplify and improve the user flow.
Competitive analysis: I evaluated ten websites (i.e. AirBnb, Zillow), to see how they displayed complex information on maps and incorporated “list views”. I also looked at car websites like Honda and Toyota to study their website infrastructure, since a consumer’s ability to “build and price” or select an “inventory car” parallels the new construction home buying journey.
User Interviews (Sales Team): Our team interviewed and observed a sales team to see how they used the sitemap to conduct sales with prospective customers walking into a sales office.
User Tests: We conducted usability test on usertesting.com to gather information on user expectations and identify areas for improvement.
Research Findings
Opportunity #1. What users care most about is not immediately reflected on the sitemap. The price of home, basic specs, and image of home, should be integrated into the sitemap to provide users with the information that is most important to them when browsing available homes.
Opportunity #2. Users did not feel ready to reserve a home after just viewing it on the site map. Their expectation was that they would be able to see more details about the home once they identified a potential match on the sitemap.
Exploring Solutions
I designed 4 user flows to brainstorm ways to integrate an available homes details with the site map.
I also sketched and provided several different user interface enhanacements that would provide more valuable information, while making the information easier to scan - an important goal for a user at this stage of the home buying process.
Validating the solution
We selected two designs to test with 10 users using usertesting.com
Prototype A: Users see details of the home pop up in a right hand section overlaying the map.
Prototype B: Users can click a CTA “View Details” which opens a new tab to the details page.
Here is an example screen from the hi-fi prototype created in Figma. See the full prototype:
The testing validated that users preferred prototype A, where they could see more information nested within the sitemap module.
Conclusion
This project helped to identify additional enhancements to the sitemap experience. For example, users seemed confused by some of the terminology like "home collections" and the distinction between available lots and available homes, which could be clarified through more intuitive design.
I enjoyed collaborating with the sales team and shadowing them for a day as part of this project. It enabled our team to see how this tool is used not just by consumers, but by sales teams, who have a deeper understanding of the community and offerings. It was insightful to learn what provides value to the sales team's process and how to add value for various users.
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