Let me briefly explain about the company I am working for. The name of com pany is next. It has been almost 17 years since established. # of Employee is more than 550. Sales is around 117 million $
Next’s main business is real estate listing and search service called Homes. And we are No1 in Japan.
What do I mean by the word “No.1” ? According to the independent survey, Home’s is No.1 in three important areas.
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But we just don’t stop there. We are conducting various R&D projects, and I would like to share two of them with you today.
I always think “Designing Delightful Encounter, for whom?” As I stated before, Homes is the No1 Real estate listing site in Japan. Therefore, people who are comfortable with using PC and Smartphone can enjoy using it. But there are more people who is interested in Real Estate Info, and not comfortable with PC and Smartphone. Like elderly people. How can we reach them ?
Various approaches can be considered to solve this problem. In this project, we focused on removing the obstacle which prevent people from using our site. Then what is obstacle ?
We assumed that GUI is the cause. GUI is very effective in packing so many choices in a small screen. However, every time I tried to teach how to use computer to elderly people, I found out they are confused with GUI.
Like “I want to do this, where is the menu ?” After I demonstrated the operation, they usually ask “That menu thing disappeared. Where are they?”
From these experience, we tried to replace GUI menus with tangible object as much as possible. The user can literally see what choice they can have, and they can set and un-set the condition just by putting object on the condition area or remove it.
For example, in current Home’s site, user click one of the check box to specify the layout they want to search. We tried to replace this GUI with these cards. One room, living, dining, and kitchen.
Next let me show you the video of system.
82years old male and 10 years old boy are using this interface. They are both pretty excited to use. For the boy, it is fun to play with cards. Put as many cards on the condition table, and see the result.
After 10 minutes,
Boy is bored. Let me confess. This is my father and my son. Father is very much interested in using this system.
He kept using this system for more than 30 minutes. Trying various conditions and browse the result. He uses PC a little. Have never used touch screen, I mean iPhone and iPad, but no problem using touch screen.
From this result, we think so far, so good. We brought demo system over there. So if you are interested in, please try them.
