Looking for a new home has made me re-evaluate the psychology of sales.
Home shopping requires a major investment of time before any major financial moves can be made. That is to say, when you’re about to make the biggest purchase of your life, you want to make as few mistakes as you possibly can, so you do a lot of preliminary research.
Yet the initial search for a house is essentially exactly the same as online dating.
We flick through listings, making snap judgments based on very little information.
Home sellers and real estate agencies list houses the same way a person lists himself on a dating site. First and foremost, you’re going to see only the best qualities and most flattering photos up for inspection.
And why wouldn’t you? Good photographs sell.
According to Chicago-based photography company VHT Studios, realtors who use professional photographs sell those listed homes 32% faster than other listings. This goes for sales of merchandise, too. The ROI on good photographs is huge.
The thing is, it’s a very imprecise science. A company can invest in beautiful photographs of whatever it’s selling, and the results might not be as good as someone else’s.
It is extremely difficult to figure out why some photographs sell better than others. You might post your best self-portrait and still get no dates.
This is why User Experience (UX) design is such an incredibly important field today. Grabbing user attention with your visual arrangement and turning it into action is of paramount importance, and it wasn’t even a job 15 years ago. It went from a small niche service industry to a major in-house component of every tech corporation.
Today, it dominates the industry. There are nearly 17,000 job offers on LinkedIn seeking UX designers.
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Despite all this, the software of the trade is mostly lacking. Split testing and site optimization software simply tells designers which images and designs work better, not why they work. Essentially, they provide no actionable data upon which to base a strategy.
Users of split-testing (A/B testing) software are forced to keep creating multiple pieces of content and picking winners from losers. They don’t learn anything.
The same goes for multivariate testing. Designers tweak multiple variables until they get the best results, but the behavioral psychology behind the changes aren’t made visible.
This creates a revolving demand for optimization as both a product and a service.
When considering an investment in the software industry, companies building testing and optimization solutions are some of the best today. Their software isn’t a gun but the bullets.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
