Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

There is a great article on the NYTimes.com about how less is more when it comes to making your audience happy. In an analysis of the difference between the Yahoo finance pages and the Google finance pages, Yahoo gives Google a kicking by attracting 17x the audience.

To quote Yahoo’s VP of Audience -

James Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo’s audience group, said, “In our research with users, we found that the more information that was displayed on the page, the greater the anxiety.” … simplicity in design; a clean, simple look, not overburdening our users with too much information on the page.

I couldn’t agree more and we here at Zoomf think the same thing. When designing our product and enhancing the website, we’re always thinking about how to make the site simpler, cleaner and more intuitive. We also have to balance that experience with our commerical objectives (driving leads from listings). Simple when you think about it from 10,000 feet.

We spend a lot of time looking at portal websites as you can imagine. For both inspiration and also for what NOT to do. We also look at generic listing websites (ecommerce sites, classifieds sites, etc) for more clues as to what makes a better listing product.

Take Zappos.com for example, the leading online shoe seller in the US that was just purchased by Amazon for a tasty $700 million a couple months ago. It is a listing website at its heart. You can filter the shoe lists by criteria and view the lists in different ways. You can also share those lists with friends and save shoes to your favorites. If you’re in charge of innovation at your property portal, there is much to learn here. Especially as you can rest assured that Zappos has dedicated millions in making sure the user experience is the best it can be thru surveys, UI specialists AND most importantly proven revenue generation thanks to a great UI built and re-designed over many years.

Zoomf has gone thru many upgrades in it’s UI and there are more exciting ones to come which we’ll announce in due course.