Problem
Two main channels are often used by students at my university to find a place to live in after first-year: Facebook groups and the university’s off-campus housing website. While the former is easily accessible for students to post in, it lacks structure and the ability to filter using multiple criteria. Meanwhile, the latter is tedious to use with an outdated web design and unfriendly user experience. Therefore, I set out to design a solution that would make it easier, simpler, and faster for students to find off-campus housing.
My target market was university students aged 19 to 23 in the local city. I learned more about my target market’s pain points by interviewing about 10 of my friends and surveying about 260 of the university’s students. One constraint was the lack of access to the university’s database of student information, so it was hard to determine if the sample of survey respondents is representative of the student population. Another constraint was time; this problem space was tackled with 7 other students as part of a feasibility project for a business course, and we only had about 3 weeks to work on it. An additional constraint was the complexity of shifting supply and demand from the existing solutions to our solution.
Our approach in solving the problem was based on design thinking principles; we considered what the present is, envisioned the future based on that, and focused on solutions that would be innovative in both form and functionality. Within our group of 8 students, I served as the main UX/UI designer and a product ideator. I drew inspiration from one of my previous hackathon projects in the same problem space to help determine features for the MVP but improved the design to be more modern and the colours to be more gender-neutral (e.g. from pink to green). I used a UI kit as a base to speed up the amount of time needed to decide on button locations and added prototyping transitions using Figma to help bring the solution to life. While the project did not go through more than 5 iterations, I made a list of feature ideas for future iterations.
Solution
My solution was “Turtle,” a Tinder-style housing app with two views, one for students and one for realtors. Using the app, students will be able to indicate preferences, quickly flip between images, like their favourite listings, and contact realtors for more information. Tinder was used as inspiration because it would add familiarity to the interface and thus make it easier for students to learn how to use the app. Moreover, a Tinder-inspired interface makes the app image-centric and gamified, which would aid in long-term user retention. Meanwhile, to generate supply via realtors, the realtor view provides analytics on pricing and customer profiles, which is unique from existing solutions. Information required for lease postings will be standardized to make it easier for users to skim postings and find the information they need.
Success metrics to validate my solution would include frequency of app use, time taken to sign lease, average duration per app session, and number of sessions before finding a lease of interest. A/B testing is also a possibility; some students could be forced to use the off-campus housing website and others to use Turtle, and metrics would be compared afterwards.
The Figma file link can be found here. A prototype tutorial video can be found here (shows the sample user experience).
Iterations
On the Realtor’s Side
Marketing Interfaces
The full feasibility report can be found here. The pitch deck can be found here. The full portfolio study can be found here.
Results + Learnings
The challenge of solving this problem was determining which features should be included in the MVP vs. later iterations of the product. While solving this problem, I learned the importance of communicating your thought process to team members so that your decisions can be improved or further accepted. If I had more time, I would want to gather user feedback about the app’s Figma prototype and design more iterations.