RENTAHOME
The Challenge
With owners having a high set of requirements when renting out their apartments, it becomes quite challenging for students and new immigrants to find a rental home that suits their needs, whether it is living close to the community they want or getting an affordable place to live in for a large family.
Objective
Understand the struggles and pain points of students and new immigrants during the process of finding a rental. Use their needs, goals and motivations to create a platform that will help the targeted user base - students and new immigrants to seamlessly and successfully search for rental homes that suit their needs.
My Role
User Experience / User Interface Designer
Tools Used
Sketch, InVision, Zeplin
Understanding the User
To understand how the house rental search is different for a student and a new immigrant as compared to other regular user groups, I decided to conduct face to face interviews with 5 students and 5 recent/new immigrants. The questions for the interview were framed to probe insights into their expectations when looking for a house, their constraints, the challenges they face when finalizing the house and the deciding factors that lead them to make the final decision. The insights obtained from the interview were mapped into an affinity diagram.
Affinity Diagram
Persona & Customer Journey Map
Creating customer journey map helped me understand the emotions that rental home seekers go through, while searching for an accommodation that suits their needs. The lows in their emotions helped me identify opportunities for building a platform that offers them the desirable user experience.
Opportunities
The opportunities identified from the customer journey included the following:
Rating of rentals by previous tenants to help future tenants make their decisions by comparing properties
Ability to view the amenities available in and around the rental home
Show the requirement/flexibility of the owners in their listings
High Fidelity Wireframes
High Fidelity prototypes were created on Sketch. I created a color palette that evoked a feeling of warmth a modern type font that was easy for users to read. The result was a clean modern interface that is attractive to the eye and a hierarchy that indicated the right tasks.
Takeaways & Learnings
Constant feedback during the design process I was able to make sure that my design process was heading in the right direction and that it would yield the results expected.
Referring to the customer user journey and the pain points of the personas helped me maintain empathy during the design process.
Following a proven design method based on user research helped me make sure that there were little to no gaps in understanding of user's emotions, needs and goals from this project.