Real estate agents will tell you, if people see a few ‘iffy’ things during an open house then those home buyers start thinking ‘what else is wrong?’. Little details in a house can make a huge difference.

This month the HomeZilla team would like to share an example of a small change making a big difference.

The feature we redesigned was “Keyword Search”. This allows people to search the HomeZilla database of geo-data for any words they want. This is especially important since our interface only reveals between 8-12 categories (depends on the city).

Unfortunately, until five days ago our “Keyword Search” was barely used. Less then 10% of the visitors to HomeZilla’s Search page used “Keyword Search”. For the last few months, we have been trying to improve the design through A/B testing.

So what happened five days ago, well our A/B testing of “Keyword Search” finally paid off. We have a new design that has drymatically increased usage of “Custom Search” (notice the new name?)

Here are images of our BEFORE (on the left) and AFTER (on the right) designs.

Before

Old custom search design

After

New custom search design

What did we change?
Just a couple of small things:

1. Change “Keyword Search” to “Custom Search”
2. Added some “Tip Text” before the text box.

What was the result?
Since launching these new changes, usage on HomeZilla’s “Keyword Search” has increased to, on average, 25%. That is over a 150% gain from changing 6 letters and adding 25 letters.

There was probably 5 different split tests before getting it ‘right’ but it was worth it.

Do you have example of small changes making a huge impact? Do you have some suggestions for HomeZilla? We would love to hear them…

This entry was posted Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 11:09 am and is filed under Corporate Update, Technology, Web Design. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.