Subscribe and receive email notifications of new blog posts.
RSS Feed
- 2026 | 29 Posts
- 2025 | 96 Posts
- 2024 | 114 Posts
- 2023 | 143 Posts
- 2022 | 188 Posts
- 2021 | 204 Posts
- 2020 | 190 Posts
- 2019 | 118 Posts
- 2018 | 122 Posts
- 2017 | 164 Posts
- 2016 | 95 Posts
- 2015 | 68 Posts
6
Everyone Likes Easy
I can't speak for everyone, but I can tell you that, at Delta Media Group®, we learned a lot this year. We learned that deer will go out of their way to climb onto an expressway and jump in front of your car even in broad daylight (maybe only I learned that). We learned that working remotely really does work, but it's not for everyone. We learned that when big hedge funds are involved, the stock market looks a lot like a casino. Lastly, and most importantly, as far as this article is concerned, we learned that simplicity is one of the most important elements when it comes to making something that people want to use.
I don't mean to make things simple at the cost of functionality. It's more about knowing how your clients will use whatever it is that you're building so that you can know what functionality to put right in front of them, and what can be tucked into the background. It's also about recognizing — and, in some cases, eliminating — any unnecessary steps in a process. There's little more frustrating than performing the same task repeatedly, being asked the same question as part of the process of completing that task, and answering it the same way every time. The easy remedy is to just use that answer automatically so that, in 99 out of 100 tries, it's already correct, and the user gets to skip a step. For that 1 out of 100 anomaly, there just needs to be some alternative way to change that answer in that single case.
This has all been pretty abstract so far, so let's look at some specific applications. In the DeltaNET®, it's possible for an admin to customize what buttons appear on the landing pages and Welcome page for their agents. If you can predict the most common actions, your agents take when logging in, you can add the necessary buttons to develop a workflow there that will take them where they need to go in the least amount of time. For example, let's say that the thing your agents do most when logging into the DeltaNET is add a customer and send them a "Happy to be Working With You" e-card. You can put an Add Customer button at the top of their Welcome page, so that's the first thing they see when they log in. They need only click it and enter their customer's information. You can put a Send e-card button right next to it that will take them straight into Creative StudioTM so that they just need to choose their template and click send. The button that links to Creative Studio could even take them to a page that's already filtering the templates to those in the category of e-cards they're most likely to want to use.
The same principle can be applied to every landing page in the DeltaNET. If users are usually looking to create or modify their custom pages when they click on the Website tab, why not give them a button right on top that takes them straight there? If they're generally interested in adding a blog article every time they click on Marketing, give them a shortcut there. You get the idea.
The other side of that coin is to avoid presenting a lot of extra buttons and options that the majority of users won't be interested in using. Of course, you still want those things to be available, but putting them right at the same level as "Add Customer" is going to add clutter, distraction, and sometimes even confusion. Fortunately, the DeltaNET allows you to make something called a Tile Collection. It basically allows you to put a button on the Welcome page that simply opens a modal that contains other tiles. With this, you can put your Add Customer, Send e-card, Send Email buttons on the Welcome page, then have a single, additional button labeled something like "Advanced Features" or simply "More...". Clicking on that would then pop up a window that contains tiles to the other equally valuable but lesser-used features. This allows you to cater to the power users while keeping it simple for everyone else. The easier you can make it, and the fewer distractions and extra options the user needs to read through to get to what they want, the more everyone will use it. This, in turn, leads to more agents sticking around for the tools that make it easier for them to run their business.
This really translates to the public website side of things as well. At Delta Media Group, we have ongoing projects to assess the usability of various features of the public websites that are shared throughout the system. However, especially when it comes to the individual sales associate websites, there's a lot you can do to make it a more friendly experience for clients that are coming to your website to search for properties. Nobody knows your clients and your market better than you do. As a real estate sales associate, you're the expert there. So why not use that expertise to drive your clients' experience on your website? Your quick search stays front and center for those users that know what, or where, they're looking and want to jump straight into the results. For those that might not be so sure, you could put links to common searches right on your homepage or in your top navigation. Maybe there are some popular school districts or subdivisions in your area. You could put obvious links to search results pages for those areas right on your homepage. You can even go a step further by creating dedicated landing pages for those areas. This has the added benefit of setting your website apart (for those clients and search engines) by adding some valuable, unique, market-specific content to it. You can put a search results section right on that page as well. That presents customers with a single page of dedicated listings in the area they want that gives them information and highlights about that area as well as a display of all of the available properties there.
Just how a well-structured and intuitive DeltaNET helps with agent adoption and retention, a user-friendly and intuitive website leads to better client adoption and retention. Your expertise in the markets you know gives you an edge over all the big portal sites by allowing you to make a website and real estate search experience that really caters to those interested in your market. If you can provide those clients with the superior experience, they'll keep coming to your site. They may even tell their friends, thereby driving more traffic and leads to you. It's all about providing the best and easiest experience.
Let's face it, the reason people are lined up around the block for the small, locally owned, one-room restaurant instead of heading to the nearest big chain restaurant is because that local place does it the best. The best food and the best experience. In real estate, you can't do much about the "food," but you can provide the best experience, and that's what's going to get them to come to you instead of the portal sites.
At Delta Media Group, we're taking these ideas to heart. It's good to be driven by the feedback of the vocal, power users that make up the minority of the user base. But while that feedback is very valuable, if that's all you look at, you can lose sight of keeping it simple in favor of adding the newest great idea. The key is in adding those features without distracting from the simplicity that the other 99% want and need to run their business every day. The DeltaNET needs to remain as robust and powerful as ever, and we will always endeavor for it to be your one-stop shop for all of the tools and resources you need to run your real estate business. However, right on the surface for day-to-day use, the things that you need most, and most often, will stay right in your face so that you don't need to go looking for them or go through a dozen clicks, pages, or windows to use them. This year, we learned about "easy," and that's a lesson we're going to keep with us from here on out. We hope you do the same.
To view past Real Estate Marketing and Technology articles and read more from the December 2021 issue, click here.Â
