Redfin is going to be hugely successful and kick the pants off of it's competitors. They are going to achieve this not because there is anything special about their pricing model but because they are executing flawlessly in a wholey consumer centric way and are developing the best online experience bar none.
Glenn published a great post today about usability testing (It was later removed. Only guessing that they took it down because it could be construed as being disrespectful to their clients/testers.)
Here are some of my favorite lines from the post: (I quoted liberally from the article because so much of it was valuable.)
A web designer couldn’t figure out our website. A former brokerage customer didn’t seem to realize we were a brokerage. Someone used Google to search Redfin’s search site.
Every time we tried to give the usability subjects a marketing message about how great we are, they didn’t merely dismiss it or bypass it. They didn’t even ignore it. They never saw it in the first place, because they were so engrossed in our real estate search application.
...We would blast them with a huge graphic about our customer service, right in the middle of the screen, and then, after asking them if they saw anything about customer service, watch as their cursor orbited the graphic in a long, fruitless search.
...When we exposed a button for scheduling a home tour, the usability subjects jumped all over it, because it was part of the application. The ... users were suddenly making quantum leaps of deduction: “you have a tours button, so you must have agents in addition to a website, so you must make money as a brokerage, probably splitting the commission since it’s partially on the web.”
What that means for us is that we’re going to have keep working to build a home-buying application that guides people all the way through escrow, rather than building a search site that reels customers in, then shows them an ad for our brokerage business.
