My second portfolio project is Design a responsive website for finding rental homes allowing users to search for apartments for rent, share search results with friends, leave and view comments, contact the rental property with questions and tour requests.
User research: summary
I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the needs of the users I’m designing for. Target users seem to be college students and young working adults between ages of 19 and 32 who rent their homes either by themselves or with roommates and move frequently to pursue educational and career opportunities.
Giving that the target users are extremely busy with their daily life, finding a new rental homes often becomes very stressful and time-consuming experience. Users would like to be able to efficiently search for rental homes, quickly contact potential landlords, and easily discuss the listings with their roommates, friends, and families.
User research: pain points
Persona
Problem statement:
Rosie is a college student who needs a way to efficiently browse available apartments online, promptly discuss them with her roommates, and quickly contact the property managers because good apartments are hard to find and they go off the market quickly.
User journey map
Creating a user journey map of Rosie’s experience helped to identify user pain points and improvement opportunities.
Sitemap
My goal was to create simple intuitive navigation to eliminate confusion and create good user experience.
Paper wireframes
I sketched a few paper wireframes for each page of EZRent website, trying to focus on keeping the layout simple and navigation intuitive.
For example, sketches on the right represent different wireframe variations of the home screen with stars marking the most effective elements that I included in the refined paper wireframe of the home screen.
Paper wireframe screen size variation(s)
To make sure that EZRent website will be fully responsive, I designed wireframes for additional screen sizes. Shown are the examples of the EZRent home screen for tablet and mobile screens.
Digital wireframes
Keeping in mind user pain points and trying to improve user experience, I moved from paper wireframes to digital wireframes.
Digital wireframe screen size variations
Low-fidelity prototype (Adobe XD)
I connected all of the screens to create low-fidelity prototype simulating main user flow of searching for rental apartments and managing user account to make the search for apartment more effective. Click to view EZRent low-fidelity prototype
Usability study: parameters
Usability study: findings
Unmoderated usability study showed:
Mockups
Usability study showed that users would like to have easier access to the messages/comments from their user groups so I added “Messages” link to the top navigation bar.
Usability study revealed that users want an easy way to see and manage user groups they created so I added a button “Manage/Create Groups” to the Profile screen.
