Dropdowns vs Sliders
Joel at Future of Real Estate Marketing has an article on New Real Estate Search Mashups and makes the following comment about ‘clunky drop down menus’:
On first impression, dsSearchAgent has a nice simple design. It uses a tabs and sliders approach to refining search criteria that reminded me a lot of Shackyack and Blueroof.com. For me it feels like a much more intuitive way to search, as opposed to the approach taken by its closest competitor RealBird.com, which still relies on clunky drop down menus.
Here’s a screenshot of Blueroof’s sliders:
Blue Roof Sliders Hosted on ZooomrAt Redfin over the last several months we have been re-designing our user experience (you’ll get to see it soon!) and something we discussed was sliders vs drop downs (we currently use drop downs). Our design team (which is really just me and Mark) were both pretty opposed to sliders. While they initially look cool I think that most users have a hard time sliding them to the sometimes precise value that they are searching for (especially true for more mature audiences who haven’t grown up with a mouse in hand). The other huge drawback is the large amount of visual real estate they occupy.
On the other extreme are text input boxes which I feel offer a large amount of precision but are time consuming to fill out and add complexity to the error handling for validating the input and offering a useful experience when a user enters an incorrect value.
And so with our re-design we have chosen to continue to use drop downs which I think offer a good enough level of precision, don’t occupy too much visual real estate, are a familiar paradigm and are easy to use. My only concern is that the user has to expand the drop down in order to discover the values beneath.
In the same post Joel also points to, House Hunter 2.0, which uses a radius for searching instead of the traditional square/rectangle:
HouseHunter-SearchRadius Hosted on ZooomrI must say that I really like this option for searching (and I would make it an option). I know that when I was looking for a house back in college what I did was take a CD and a map, center the CD on the university, drew a circle around it, photocopied it, gave it to my realtor and told him to only show me homes within the circle (which meant I was looking at houses that were no more than a 25 minute walk from the building on campus that I and my friends spent the most time in).
At Redfin your only option is to constrain searches to the map view you’re currently looking at which in our current site is roughly square but will be more rectangular in the future. Certainly not ideal for the walking commute scenarios. Hopefully we can improve this in the future!
January 4th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I guess it’s a matter of personal preference and maybe even a left brain/right brain thing… I’m definitely more of a visual person so the sliders appeal to me.
I hear you on the usability front though, sometimes they are a pain and I can appreciate the simplicity of the drop down (even if they are clunky ;))
I wonder if there isn’t a way to meet halfway though?
Are their particular search criteria that are better represented with sliders? Others with drop down? Or is it better to have a standard for all fields?
January 4th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
In our property search, mentioned in the writeup by Joel at Future of Real Estate Marketing, we give the users the option to use either sliders or text boxes with just a simple link at the top of the search panel. We also allow the agents who purchase the pro version of our product to customize whether they want to show sliders or text boxes by default. I suppose there may be better ways to do it, but that choice is what people seemed to like best in our unofficial user survey. We’re curious to get more feedback on it though as more people start using it.
January 4th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
Hi Andrew, I did see that you offer users the choice and I like that. Though I always worry about giving users too much choice and it is my preference that the designers make the executive decision about what the ideal interface is and err on the side of too few settings as opposed to too many.
At this point I think we’re all guessing here and maybe in a year we’ll see once we have real data about what users prefer :).
January 4th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
FYI, that last comment is from me, my profile just wasn’t configured properly…
January 4th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
I like the circle because it makes it clear that the search is defined by the space on the map, which most people don’t realize.