HOMIE
Housing Rental Service
4th Year Minor Studio - 4 Months - Group Project
My first comprehensive introduction to the world of UX and UI Design.
As a team of 4, Shiva Moin, Sash Mahara, Aimee Decruyenaere and I were tasked to redesign a significant digital service. Since we’d all had varying experiences with housing rental services as students, we set out to ameliorate the rental experience for fellow tenants.
PROBLEM SPACE
Many young adults will go through the housing rental process at one or more points in their lives. However, the experience can be a daunting, overwhelming, and cumbersome journey.
Our goal was to create a solution that facilitates a smoother entry and overall experience that brings more confidence and enjoyment to an otherwise stressful life task.
RESEARCH & PROBLEM EXPLORATION
Research Goals
Understand the tools/services that renters currently use
Identify key criteria renters look for when searching for housing
Understand users’ knowledge regarding renting legalities
Gain insight into the end-to-end process of renting a property
Interviews
Through conducting a handful of interviews with a variety of renters, many patterns and pain-points emerged. After a thorough data analysis with several levels of coding, we synthesized our findings into several key insights.
Snapshot of data coding from interviews
Insights
The renting process is often learned by word of mouth and through trial and error, making it difficult for inexperienced renters to know where to begin and confidently carry out the entire process.
Personas
To capture the reality of user experiences, we developed personas based on our interviewees to increase the quality and consistency of our design efforts. We created four distinct personas to guide us, and ultimately decided to focus our design efforts on Carly’s persona, as we felt her story would provide a variety of unique challenges.
Journey Mapping
We then created a user journey map to thoroughly understand the renting journey and see where pain-points occur. This confirmed the need for innovation to make all phases more pleasant and revealed to us the key opportunities where our solution could help the most.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Information Architecture
Our proposed solution was primarily a web-based application that facilitates the housing rental process from the initial housing search to the final move-in.
The application would address pain-points regarding trust between tenants and landlords, standardization of listings, safety/security, scheduling viewings, legal navigation, and document sharing.
User Flows
After identifying several use cases, we chose 3 user flows we felt were most crucial to improving the renting process and began wireframing.
1. Landords Creating Listings
2. Renters Browsing & Comparing Listings
3. Renters Scheduling Viewings
User Testing
These user flows were then developed into a functional prototype to test with a handful of users.
The following are specific goals participants were asked to achieve without further prompting:
Improvements
Testing was very successful; all 3 flows passed with high ratings. However, we pinpointed several areas for improvement such as:
The association between ‘favourited listing’ and ‘my move’
Comparing listing photos
The status filters for booked viewings
The landlord’s listing creation, verification, and score
CONCEPT REFINEMENT
Visual Design
To give Homie character, we established four brand attributes that embodied the improved experience we wanted to create for our users.
Trustworthy, approachable, friendly, and transparent.
From there, we created a mood board to capture the essence of our brand and applied the design language to all wireframes.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
Below is the final working prototype showcasing a tenant journey through Homie. Try it for yourself!
