Daft.ie vs. MyHome.ie: the user experience

 – posted October 3rd, 2006 by Brian Donohue   Comments (3) for Daft.ie vs. MyHome.ie: the user experience

Near the start of September, Daft.ie announced a new property mapping feature on their site. They've combined the functionality of Google Maps with their own database of houses for sale. In other words, it's a mashup. (You can learn more about mashups from Colm's article earlier this year.)

The result? It's fantastic.

Mind you, this is not new in the global context. Similar housing maps are widely available in the US and UK. But this is the first one in Ireland. And if you're looking to buy a house, it makes all the difference.

For example, say I want see what's on offer in Stoneybatter. I simply zoom into that area of Dublin (there's several ways to do it, but I used the zoom feature and dragged the map to Stoneybatter). And immediately I can see how many houses are on offer, and where they are. Just click on a house and you get a little photo with the basic details: costs and number of bedrooms.

Screenshot of the new Daft map search

And because this has Ajax functionality, you can just click and drag the map to reposition, which it does immediately (thanks, Google). This is the beauty of it.

Also, Daft have given some basic, but essential, search refinement options -- you can view just houses that have, say at least 3 beds, and cost no more than 350,000 (which of course in Dublin results in a virtually blank map, even when you zoom out!).

The experience on MyHome

Let's compare this to myhome.ie. If you search by map, you still have to enter a variety of fields, and you can't get straight into the map.

Screenshot of the starting point of using MyHome map search.

The first few times I used this, I got no results because I typed "Stoneybatter" in the "Town or City Area" field.

I think most people would just opt for the text search on the home page. But this is still a pain because you have to select all the areas you want, which is awkward with a list this large and a box this small.

Screenshot of the MyHome homepage

However, you can eventually find your way to the map. And MyHome does show a map similar to what's on Daft, with similar functionality. But try zooming in or out, or quickly moving areas, and, well, it's just a pain. And it's much smaller, too. This map size difference actually has a major impact on the usability of the map. A bigger map is just better to use.

What it comes down to is this: the user experience on Daft is much better than on MyHome. (And I think this applies to most of the functionality on the sites, not just the maps.)

Try both of them and see what you think. Which do you prefer?

Daft MD to speak at Boot Camp

By the way, the Managing Director of Daft, Eamonn Fallon, will be speaking at our upcoming Boot Camp event, as part of the Gurus session on Thursday afternoon. I'd say he'll have some interesting stories about their experience battling it out with MyHome for dominance of the online Irish housing market.

Categories: Site reviews and Usability

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