Trulia optimizes website design with SiteSpect

Trulia employs technology from SiteSpect that allows it to make website design decisions based on comparisons of how users respond to changes it introduces to its website, the companies announced today.

By introducing a small change to a subset of its users, such as larger photos or more prominent lead-capture buttons, and monitoring their behavior on the slightly different sites, the tool allows Trulia to make design tweaks using information instead of hunches, said Dan Voorhies, director of analytics at Trulia.

“It makes us really hypothesis-driven,” Voorhies said.

Trulia, which started using the technology from the Boston-based SiteSpect in 2012, used the side-by-side design testing tool to find the best way to integrate its crime and school data in property detail pages, Voorhies said.

SiteSpect, which does not use JavaScript tags for the testing that it says slows down websites, also provides comparative user analytics for back-end platforms and mobile apps.