Realestate.com.au Mobile

The first mobile interface for Realestate.com.au, Australia's largest property portal.

As part of working at REA as a UI Designer / Developer, one of the platforms for developing new ideas has been 'Labs'. Just before the release of the iPhone in Australia, I saw a gap in our offering; we didn't have a compelling mobile experience.

I built the first prototype in a week or so, and after it was rebuilt for production (with the efforts of Mike Breeze and Michael Allan) and launched in the UK for propertyfinder.com it was receiving ~15,000 unique browsers a month.

The success of the UK mobile site saw a release for our main brand, realestate.com.au, which it now has in the hundreds of thousands unique browsers monthly.

REA Mobile

From it's inception, it was designed to work across a diverse range of mobile devices, progressively enhancing to adapt to any device. It (on the iPhone) asynchronously loaded properties straight from the results list, reducing the amount of page load and making for an significantly improved fluid search, rather than the "click-on-property, reload-page, back, repeat" users saw on their desktop. The smaller screen offered challenges to how to best use the available space to it's maximum, yet remain uncluttered. Key learnings from this were:

  • Don't try and remake your whole site, with every feature, on a mobile. Do what people need, and what people need on a mobile is different to what they need on a desktop.
  • Different users use a mobile to a full site. We found much higher ratios of (mostly likely) younger people were using the mobile site, and the difference of search for Buy verses Rent was much closer on the mobile site rather than the full site (which saw Buy searches having the majority).
  • If you are going to do browser detection, do it right. We had a simple regex-based solution initially, and it worked well for a while. As soon as you want to fix things for individual devices (especially those used by the business leaders of the business, heheh), without a more robust solution it is hard. However, the trade off is more work up front implementing a solution that is scalable. We found some Apache level ones, but there are lots of options available.
  • Optimise the hell out of images. We found that the same images, uncompressed from the data centres, could add ~200kb to a page of twenty property listings. Jam those down to JPGs, and up the compression. For desktop, you want to sit around 80% quality, but on a mobile, especially for thumbnails, 20% seemed to work fine for us!
  • Really simple, good, semantic HTML is key. Browsers (I'm looking at you, BlackBerry) on the older phones just don't support all of HTML, or CSS on certain elements. And it can be hard to debug why. Write simple code, and whole bunches of problems just go away.

As my original mobile site has now been replaced with a new one, leveraging a newer platform, I'm happy to show it here. My pet project has grown up and left the coup, and hopefully will take a life on its own. Check out the new one at m.realestate.com.au.