Dwelle: A Collaborative Approach to Housing Searches
Role: User Experience Researcher and Designer in a team of four
Class Project
This was a multi-method study that involved discovery research and usability testing with prototypes.
Context & Background
Moving to the Bay Area was stressful! Some of the biggest concerns involved a general lack of familiarity with the neighborhoods (coming from a different state), the truth about the safety of the areas, ways to find and/or communicate with current residents for their opinions, learning the perks and pitfalls of commuting to campus from the apartments. The existing apartment review resources did not provide very much information about quality-of-life concerns, many of which cannot be discerned even from visiting the apartments in person.
Research Question
What does the workflow of a rental apartment search look like within the bay area housing market?
Research Participants
To begin our research, we identified two potential users to begin recruiting participants: Ideal users were people currently in the process of searching for new housing. Adjacent users were people who had recently relocated within the past month.
Each group member recruited one research participant, totaling four research participants.
Participant 1
Age: 29 UC Berkeley Grad Student
Experienced Mover
Moved into a new apartment one month prior to the interview
Experienced Mover
Moved into a new apartment one month prior to the interview
Participant 2
Age: 29
Working professional
Four moves in six years
Searching for housing at the time of the interview
Working professional
Four moves in six years
Searching for housing at the time of the interview
Participant 3
Age: 27
UC Berkeley Grad Student Working part-time
Searching for housing at the time of the interview
UC Berkeley Grad Student Working part-time
Searching for housing at the time of the interview
Participant 4
Age: 22
UC Berkeley Grad Student
New to the Bay Area
Recently found an apartment prior to the interview
UC Berkeley Grad Student
New to the Bay Area
Recently found an apartment prior to the interview
Methodology
We formulated a semi-structured interview asking background questions on why and how our participants searched for housing.
Then, we instructed our participants to search for housing how they usually would while narrating their thought processes.
We recorded their screen while performing their housing search.
Affinity Diagram
We took our notes and recordings of the interviews and transcribed key points onto sticky notes using miro.
After gathering sticky notes, we grouped our findings, observations, and quotes into common themes and categories.
Key Insights
People are constantly rethinking parameters and reassessing priorities.
People are most willing to compromise on space or proximity to fun things.
There is a lack of trust in available resources and platforms, so users are likely to consult multiple resources as well as personal networks and user-generated/crowd-sourced insights from sites like Reddit.
In addition to a lack of trust in available resources and platforms, users likely have to do extensive research.
Housing search criteria are iterative and will often respond to changing nature of Bay Area neighborhoods.
Those who have not lived in the Bay Area before were likely to research neighborhood areas
People are most willing to compromise on space or proximity to fun things.
Point of View
Looking for a rental in the Bay Area is often an extensive vetting process. How might we streamline the process?
From our findings, we formulated a point of view (POV) to begin brainstorming and designing solutions from. This enabled us to have a more user-centered approach grounded in research as we proposed potential solutions.
Proposed Solution
An in-browser web tool to organize the moving process that leverages 3 key features:
Chrome Extention
Quickly and easily collect listings from various sources
Dashboard
Easily manage and share the saved listings
Map View
Visualize the area and compare listings
Prototypes
Usability Testing
Key Questions:
Chrome Extension
How would a user implement our Chrome extension to aggregate housing listings they are interested in?
Dashboard
Does the sorting and filtering on the website meet the user’s needs for organizing the saved listings?
Map View
Does seeing saved listings in a map view address the user’s need to understand where listings are in relation to important locations such as workplace, school, restaurants?
Methodology
We brought back participants from our initial need-finding interviews to test our three prototypes. Each participant was introduced to the concept of Dwelle, and then given a set of tasks to complete. We also drafted a semi-structured interview guide. The goal was to observe if our participants could complete the given task, and note any points of frustration, confusion etc.
Contextual Inquiry
Task Analysis
Observation
Task Analysis
Observation
A few words from our participants
“I’m not sure what the point of the map feature is.”
“The learning curve is there.”
“I Really like the add key location if I wanted to add my job or a friend’s place”
“It’s annoying that the extension takes up so much space, and I’m confused why there would be two options to add a listing vs. multiple listings”
“Bulk add doesn't seem that useful because all I can see is the picture and title in the grid view. I always click on the individual listing to see if it’s actually something that’s interesting to me”
Key Findings & proposed changes
Bulk add feature is not useful because users always read the details of a listing to know if they’re interested
Proposed change: Remove bulk add feature and focus on developing a single add feature
Users were unclear about the purpose of the product because of the design was too reminiscent of existing housing search platforms.
Proposed change: Re-design the product to mirror a note-taking, or digital collaboration product instead of an apartment listings site.
Users encountered friction at several points with using the prototype when animations did not meet expectations.
Proposed change: Update the prototype to improve the flow and undergo additional testing to ensure that the new design matches user expectations.
Reflections & Learnings
In this project, it would have been best to have more participants in the need-finding and usability testing stages.
I also learned that users are heavily biased by interface aesthetics, and there are times when the design of an interface serves as a distraction to evaluating the usability of a product.
In usability testing, there were some slight mishaps in directing our users to the task. In the future, I would carefully detail the task, as well as give a more holistic explanation of our study's goals before beginning.
Contributors
Nereida Navalesca
One User Interview
Map Prototype
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Map Prototype
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Mia Schneider-Martin
One User Interview
Chrome Extension Prototype
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Chrome Extension Prototype
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Corrin Morgan
One User Interview
Dashboard Prototype
Sample Listing Design
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Dashboard Prototype
Sample Listing Design
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Zoya Abdullah
One User Interview
Map Prototype
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis
Map Prototype
One Usability Test
Interview Guide Development
Finding Analysis