Why did you remove the photo from the home page?

During our beta testing phase we asked all of our beta testers what they thought of the picture of the girl standing at the front door located on our home page.

We were surprised by the response we got.

We asked the question in a multiple choice format as we do for most of our beta questions.

The question was phrased this way: “Please look at the picture of the girl on our home page (standing at the door). Do you feel she is the right demographic for a person renting your properties?”

• Yes she is the right age and the picture complements the site well
• Yes she is, but she really doesn’t add to the site
• The picture doesn’t help at all and in my opinion should be taken off the site

Of course we were biased towards the photo and we thought it complemented the site well because we thought she represented the demographic of people that rent houses pretty well. We thought asking the question was kind of a waste, but now we are glad we did.

Well, we were wrong. Most of our tester thought the photo either didn’t add to the site or thought it should be taken off the site. Very few thought it complemented the site.

Many also added additional comments to explain why they answered the multiple choice question the way they did. Some thought instead of the girl we should add a picture of a living room or something else. Other suggestions were to rotate images of other races, sexes, families, roommates etc. Another thought the photo looked rather suggestive.

So we took the photo off the site. We learned that images and the site’s appearance can be an issue to some when using a rental site. We plan to do ask more questions like this one in the future to hopefully fine tune the way our site looks. We want to try more photos like the ones suggested to see how our users like them.

Thanks to all our testers for their honest input.