Who is your product made for?
We decided to focus on international students who are coming to Berkeley for a semester abroad and are looking for housing.
What’s the existing problem? What’s the need of the user?
They are looking for housing from their home and need to rent a place to live without being able to visit the apartment or meet the landlord. These users need to be able to trust that they are getting a good place with a reliable landlord.
How does your design solve for it?
Our design emphasizes trust while also trying to create an enjoyable experience for the user that gives them a sense of place and community. We do this by showing the user’s connections to the landlord or former tenants as well as to people who live nearby.
Walk us through the design flow
Screen 1: The left side of the screen shows the listing of available accommodations available for rent. This listing would be ordered by proximity from the “area of focus”. And one of the touch points would be a sliding scale to increase or decrease the search radius that increases or decreases the results.
Screen 2: Circles indicate housing options and show the number of connections you have to the landlord, former tenants, or the area. The larger circles signify more connections.
Screen 3: The user can click on one of the options to expand the connections and see the paths through which they are connected.
Screen 4: This is a detail screen of one listing which the user can save or reject by swiping. Reviews from people in the user’s network about the apartment or landlord would also show here.
How do you want users to feel when they use your product?
We want users to feel excited about the place they are moving to and feel confident that they will be arriving somewhere that they will want to live and that will match their expectations based on the online listing. Our primary goal is to instill trust while also creating an enjoyable and welcoming experience for the user.
Mood board available here: https://goo.gl/dqF3Yk
Love the idea of filtering the listings through shared connections. However, there’s a tension of availability vs. connection, they don’t always match. What if there’s no connection for the options listed? Is there any crowd-sourced info overlay on top of the listing? Think ‘Waze’, and the ‘Busy hour forecast on Google map’.
Good job on the mood board by the way! It shows that you’re being thoughtful about what the right signature form there should be for visualizing the connection. And has searched for inspiration from both digital and non-digital mediums.