Designing a soft preference based search interface for the housing market

Websites aiming to assist users in finding a new house are becoming increasingly popular. Finding a potential relevant house is based on the users’ search criteria and the ability to define these criteria in an easy-to-use search user interface. Due to hard constraints, over-specification is one of the problems many users encounter when searching for a house online. In this paper, we propose a soft constraint based search user interface for the housing domain. Our analysis of existing websites and user opinions suggests the need for an interface with more flexibility towards the user, with a focus on ranking relevant items according to the user’s weighted importance for selected filters. The proposed interface design is evaluated with five potential users and reflects on the impact and possible improvements.