ManageMyProperty.com was launched to make it easier for property owners to find, review and select a property manager for their properties.
Property owners want to be able to see more than an address and phone number when deciding who will manage their property or association. With ManageMyProperty.com, owners are able to view detailed management company profiles as well as guides on what to expect and how to navigate through the process of selecting a manager.
For property managers, we provide an affordable way to promote their business with a transparent pay for performance pricing model where they bid for placement on the site in a similar fashion to how google adwords customers bid on keywords.
Here's the feedback exercise:
1) Inspect the homepage - Is it immediately obvious what the site does? Do you like the design?
2) Scroll down on the homepage and click on the city Austin. On the next page,click on the company RealManage - Is there anything you would add or remove from the profile layout?
3) Click on the "For Property Managers" tab - How could the landing page be improved?
Extra credit (Really helpful to us!)
4) Click the sign up now button on the services page and go through the process of creating a company profile (Dont worry it won't display unless we approve it) - What parts of the process were confusing or could be improved?
Nice design, but when I tried entering a local zip code nothing showed up. I guess the question is how big is the database? And will having a limited db, affect the retention of new users.
Congrats - well done. Soothing tones of the design make it comforting. The larger type style and language used was easy to follow and understand. Nice sales pages.
The popup that asks if I'd be willing to fill a survey has a broken "yes" button.
I just looked in my area and found 1 property manager. There was barely any information on it. I was expecting reviews, ratings, perhaps other listings it has...just got name and address.
I like your colors, layout is ok. One thing I'm not too fond of is the amount of text you have. People don't like to read, I sure don't, maybe you can come up with some creative way to hold your information in a more visually appealing way or get rid of the non-important stuff.
For #2 above, I didn't even see a city "Austin" on the homepage...not sure what you want me to do.
When creating an account, the required fields should be in bold or something different than the optional fields.
Your site looks a bit disorganized. I'd like to see cohesiveness from page to page. I feel like I'm being introduced to a whole new site every time a new page comes up. Try to stick to one design across the site. When I have some action that is needed, I like to see enumerated items to make it easier for me to understand what is needed from me.
I like your site, I just think it needs a lil' re-design.
Thanks for the feedback. Will check out the broken yes button.
Depth of listings is what we are working hard to improve right now. A bit of a chicken and the egg problem.
Super helpful commentary on the design and layout. We realize that we have room for improvement there. I see some ways that our forms could be optimized a bit more. There are very few optional fields so it does not make sense to bold the field titles on those that are required, but I do see your point about consistency of layout.
Thanks again for the feedback.
1. Yes, it is obvious what the site does. I do like the design.
2. I don't like the popup that comes when I visit an inner page. I think the detail page could do with a bit more styling, or perhaps a photo. It is a very big wall of text. I like the facts on the right.
3. I think the landing page is fine.
4. very straight forward. Not confusing at all.
To me it was very obvious what the site does almost immediately and that's without me being someone that would be remotely interested in property management. The tagline made it very clear and I love how central and obvious the form was to begin finding a property management company. Kudos for not making me look around to find that.
One issue I had with the main page was the "Log In" button. It is transparent (at least on my browser, see screenshot) and so it was a bit too hidden for my preferences. I think I would like to see it filled in w/a background color personally to "pop" more.
I also really like that you provide a free guide to hiring a property management company. Free, useful information like that shows good-will and will bring you more customers. One thing you may want to consider is adding an email subscription list form on that page. I almost expected there to be one and if there was I did not see it. That way people can sign up to your mailing list so you can send out periodic property management tips and guide updates to them.
The navigation system was really simple to use.
I found nothing confusing at all.
I was unable to check the company profiles because none were found for my area (zip 55906).
I can see this being a very valuable asset to many people once the site grows a bit. Nice work.
Screenshots
Brian,
Thanks alot for the feedback. We plan on improving the form because while it functions fine, it could be improved so that there are less choices to choose from and more property types displayed without having to click on the drop down. I have attached a screen shot of what the new form will look like.
You are right about the login button being more subdued, we want it to be a part of the background but we could probably make it a little more obvious.
The hiring guide took some effort but we think its going to pay off. You are right on about adding a way for people to subscribe via rss or email.
On the homepage there are links to different metros and if you click on austin, you will find a company profile.
Thanks alot for the feedback.
Screenshots
Thanks for pointing me to Austin to check one out. I like the look of the profile page and there seems to be a lot of quality information there.
My one concern is how will a user (say I wanted to use a mgmt company to manage some rental properties I had) easily differentiate between the matching companies when there are more options? I'm not sure if there is some sort of a common feature-matrix you can come up with and allow comparisons or what but it would be nice to be able to see which companies offer the most of what I want at a glance without reading a novel on each one. Don't get me wrong, the novel-sized amount of information is nice and will help when there are a few options left but if they started off with 10 for example, that's a lot to read and weigh in a user's head. As we all know, users don't like to read!
I like the mock-up for the new form. I think that will be much more useful than the existing drop-down.
You make a really good point. We have absolutely have a feature matrix on our feature road map. The only hesitation we had was that its significant effort and we have reservations about creating a rigid structure property managers have to use without better knowing their needs. We will likely deploy that kind of feature after we are able to get more feedback from users and managers.
When we do it will allow for search results page filtering. Not totally sure how it will look but probably something roughly similar to this or this