I’ve written about this before. It comes up about every time I look for a new place to live. I moved back in with my parents a while back, but unfortunately it just doesn’t jive well with my social life. No disrespect to my parents (i love them), I just need a place to call my own. This brings us to the search.
Looking for a place to live in Utah county sucks because no good search tools exist. The closest thing I had to a good search tool was KSL Classifieds. Unfortunately, they’ve replaced their homes section of the site with some service called Rentler. It’s pretty clear that Rentler has put quite a bit of money into their site design, but unfortunately it’s clear that Rentler lacks a good UX developer. There are a number of glaring issues that make searching a bane:
- There are no text summaries on the main search results page.
This by far is the biggest problem I have with Rentler. Really, the first two sentences of the description are all I need to make a quick yes/no decision on a property. Normally because these first two sentences include important key phrases like, “women only” (obviously that’s a no, because I have a penis), “BYU Approved” (no), and “shared room” (no). Instead of being able to blaze through hundreds of ads in a few minutes, I have to click on each one, load a whole new page and then click another link to get a full summary. That’s just shit UX design. - No result sorting in any way.
Seriously? What in the hell were they thinking? The default (and only available) search sorting is price high-to-low. I like to view my ads from the newest to oldest posting. The new ones are more likely to be open (and actually relevant). Furthermore, I don’t know a single person who thinks to themselves, “Ah yes, I’d like to search in the very tip top of my price range.” When I set price ranges, the high is the absolute most I would want to spend… aka the last resort. Absolutely not the first thing I want to see. - Hope you didn’t want to select a price range smaller than $400:
Really, I could write a better site than this in under a week. Node.js would be the server side, couchdb for the database, UI would be all AJAXy (and actually usable), and it would have a RESTy JSON API.