Paul: To get started, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? How you came into your current role, some steps of your career to get to this point?
Laurie: I’m the principal product manager for the Android apps at Realtor.com, and I have over 15 years of product management experience. I started as an engineer, and then I moved into product management. I’m really focused on human-centered design. I almost fell into human-centered design by accident. From the first time I worked in product management, I showed a design mock-up to some people and got some really great feedback, and started doing that all the time. Then, I learned about usability testing and human-centered design, and it has really shaped my career. That’s actually been the key to the successful products that I’ve been doing for the last 15 years.
Paul: Wow, I wish a lot of product managers would have that kind of an insight. That would be amazing for our world today, I think. So, what will you be talking about at XD IMMERSIVE?
Laurie: I’m going to be talking about a feature that we launched last August, called “Street Peek.” It’s an AR feature that helps people learn about the details of every home in the U.S, but you need to be next to that home. So, if you’re out on a street that has homes, you can open up the app, look at it through the camera, and a price bubble will appear above it that will tell you the price of the house, the estimated price if it’s not for sale, or the rental price if it’s for rent, how many beds and baths, and the address. You can tap on that bubble and actually go see the details of that home on a different details page. So, I’ll be talking about that feature.
Paul: Cool. So, how do you actually get that on your phone? You download it from the app and sign in, or how does it actually work?
Laurie: You download the app. It’s Realtor.com, and it’s on Android. You download the Android app, and you don’t have to sign in, you just open up the app and you tap on the camera icon. You’ll need to calibrate the sensors in the phone just by turning it back and forth or up and down, and that will calibrate it so that the sensors will know which direction you’re pointing and exactly where you are.
Paul: That sounds really cool. I’ve thought about that a lot of times when I’ve been in a neighborhood; “Hey, I wonder how much that house costs,” or, “What are prices like around here?” It sounds really useful to be able to then download the app, especially from somebody you trust, like Realtor.com, you know that it’s going to be accurate information. How is usage?
Laurie: People love it. People who use it absolutely love it.
Paul: Are you getting some comments back from them, or downloads? How do you see how it’s going today?
Laurie: We do get comments back, and we do CSAT: consumer satisfaction. Our normal consumer satisfaction rating is relatively high--it’s over 80, usually around 85. But with people who use this feature, it’s around 90. So, people who use Street Peek absolutely love it.
Paul: I can imagine. It seems like augmented reality is already playing a role at Realtor.com. But looking a little further down the road, without giving away any secrets, what kinds of things do you see on the near-term horizon, the next three to five years, for immersive technology?
Laurie: I think we’ll be getting a lot more data. To do really good immersive technology, you need a lot of data about the homes. If we can have total data about each room in a home, you could put a model of the home on a table and look inside it, walk around it, etc. You could do that for an entire neighborhood, actually. Or, you can take a home and you can expand it to full size and walk through it, as if you were there. I see that as the direction it’s taking.
Paul: Is that a combination of mixed reality, where you have some augmented and some virtual, or is it mainly augmented reality? How do you see that playing out?
Laurie: I think virtual reality right now is pretty difficult, because you have to put on a clunky headset, and a lot of times people get motion sickness with it. It takes a couple of steps, and it’s a lot of work. It’s also a very individual experience. You can’t do experience VR right now with somebody else. But augmented reality, I see more of a future for that. It’s not as complicated as virtual reality. You take your phone, you can walk around, you can see everything; you’d be able to see an entire room just by looking through your phone, and you’re still in the real world and you won’t get sick. You can also do that with someone else.
Paul: Yeah, and I guess that’s an object that each of us probably has pretty close at hand no matter where we are. Is there anything else you want to tell the readers about your talk before we sign off?
Laurie: I think that what we’ve done so far is really just the first step, and that there’s a lot more we can do and that we will be doing.