ImmoScout24 is Germany's number 1 real estate marketplace for renting, buying, and selling private and commercial properties. ImmoScout24 supports more than 20 million people using the online marketplace/app to search, purchase, finance, or move to their new homes every month. Since 2012, ImmoScout24 has also been active in the Austrian residential and commercial real estate market and records around 3.5 million visits every month.
ImmoScout24 is part of the Scout24 group of companies.
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We joined ImmoScout24’s Central Listings team as Interim PMs for both Web and Mobile App teams. The Central Listing team is responsible for creating and maintaining ad listing flow for private and commercial properties.
For more than a year, there had been no ownership and no development/improvement to these ad listing flow, and as part of this mission, our goal was to create a customer-centric, scalable, and easy-to-maintain listings flow.
We helped identify missed opportunities to quickly test hypotheses and give customers a smooth and streamlined experience. With the acquisition of new companies/products by ImmoScout24, the complexity and maintenance of the listings flow increased. We helped with identifying opportunities to simplify the listing flow and reduce costs.
We analyzed the existing features and compared those on the web and mobile app. We looked into the number of listings created for different property types on the web and started experimenting by adding such missing property types in the mobile app. With this functionality, the users could now list different property types (for example, listing a WG/flat share property and furnished property type) via the mobile app. This helped increase the traffic at the start of the funnel and hence an increase in ad listings created via the app.
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Doing some analysis on the Google Analytics reports, we found out from the data that Commercial Property types like Offices and Halls that were just listed via the web had a significantly higher number of listings within the Commercial properties segment. We thus experimented with enabling users to list such property types via mobile app. Initially, we did not develop the entire native listing flow for such property types and just wanted to test if we would get significant traffic for such properties in-app. However, with this experiment, we realized this was not the case and thus did not invest in building such flow natively. Such quick experiments helped us understand what/where we needed to invest our efforts and hence helped frame the future strategy and roadmap for the mobile app.
We also realized that the ad listing flow was quite complex. We looked at the funnel to understand where the users dropped off and which fields were mostly unfilled. We did this to understand why users didn’t complete creating and publishing the listing and where the ad insertion flow can be optimized. After identifying such areas, we did multiple A/B test experiments to optimize the ad insertion flow by merging/combining some unfilled fields with other screens. Understanding where the users used to drop off, we also looked into shifting some of the screens within the flow to test if this helped increase the user motivation to continue creating the ad listing and increase the conversion rate.
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We also conducted multiple user interviews to identify pain points and where the users struggled while creating and publishing the ads via mobile app. Looking into such issues, we worked together with the User Researchers and UX Designers to update and optimize the user flow by changing copies for some fields, adding tooltips, updating CTAs, and making it more visible for the users to find what they are looking for at different steps in their journey to publishing the ad.
We realized the ad listing flow was outdated and hadn’t been looked into/maintained for more than a year. There were not only UX/UI problems with the flow, but it was on an old tech stack that made it difficult to maintain and impossible to experiment on quickly. Furthermore, due to a previous organizational structure, the flow had been re-created for every use case, which meant that the company was maintaining close to 20 flows (and codebases): all of which more or less did the same thing! That was a huge necessary cost.
We worked together with the UX Designer on this and tried to understand, using the user interviews, the user’s pain points. Based on the interviews and creating one simplified user flow (to save costs required for maintaining multiple flows for different property types), the designer came up with a revamped UI/UX for the listing flow for the web. Working with the web development team, we did a “phased” rollout for this new ad listing flow to ensure we track any major decrease in conversions that might happen due to the drastic changes for users in the way they list their properties.
In conjunction with this initiative, we were responsible for setting up the entire team that was involved in working on this flow. This included helping to onboard the new engineers, setting up the ways of working for the team, helping to drive OKR planning for the quarter, and establishing all communication cadences that involved the team.
We also worked on various UI/UX improvements, including the wording changes on the listing Landing Page to reduce customer confusion around the different property types and thus help increase the conversion rate.
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💡 Successfully set up and implemented A/B Tests to optimize ad listing flow for mobile app users.
💡 Increased the number of property ad listings created via the app by ~5%.
💡 Shaped up initiatives and implemented UI/UX improvements in the mobile app flow for listing different property types and improved conversion by ~3%.
💡 Oversaw the creation of a new web team, including setting up all agile ways of working and leading them through quarterly planning.
💡 Developed and released the first version of a new adaptable listings flow that could quickly be iterated and experimented on.
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