Rent Hunter App

Mobile Design

Project Overview

It has always been frustrating to find a new apartment or a place to live. Different people has different situation. Finding an apartment before moving to a new city can be tricky because you barely know about neighborhood and areas. Like in my case, I’m an international student and first time in the states. It’s very frustrating to find a place to live and have a lot of conditions have been involved such as transportation, safety, budget and etc. Not only my case, but also whether you’re new to a city or relocating to a different building or neighborhood, it can take a great deal of time and effort to find a perfect apartment and meet with the conditions that you have. The housing sites or application will be a great tool to help people to find what they need. However, there area lot of housing applications such as craigslist, Trulia Rentals, HotPads, Radpad, or even in some facebook pages are the place that people post and look for the apartment. However, the sites are not only for people who seek for an apartment, but also for a landlord or people who want to find roommates to save their cost of living as well.

Major Content Items

Apartment / Housing
Room Shared
Sublease
Utilities
Room Types

Community
Location
Price / Budget
Move-In Date

Objective

I would like to create a new housing application called “Rent Hunter”. The application will help user to find a new apartment/housing for rent. As a previous user, some housing sites have poorly organized their application which make the users confused and have to spend more time to do the task and some of them it’s still not answer for what the user need. For this project, I will create a new housing application which provide information and cover to what people need. The well-organized information and detail of the application is very important for the user to use the application effectively and efficiently. AI tools will help to get that information in the right place on the application. The result of AI tools and techniques being used to analyze and apply to design of the interface.

Target Audience

Tenant / people who looks for a rental apartment
Landlord/ Renter/ Real estate agent

Scenarios

Key Task: Checking on location that close to a transportation (Tenant)

An international student is looking for a new apartment (living off campus) before they arrive to the country. They prefer a place that close to a massive transportation and not over an hour to commute to the school

Key Task: Living with a specific community (Tenant)

A student is looking for a roommate who comes from the same community / culture.

Key Task: Finding tenants/ Advertising (Landlord/ Real estate agent)

Tenant decided not to renew the lease, a landlord tries to find a new tenant to rent the apartment after a current tenant move out.

Key Task: Shared room/ finding a roommate (Tenant)

A new graduated who is still looking for a job, tried to save living cost by finding a roommate to share the apartment with.

Key Task: Sublease (Tenant)

Tenant has to move out before the lease end, tenant find someone to sublease their apartment.

Project Methodology

1. Create a structural presentation of the application
- Create a spreadsheet of content inventory of the site by using content of familiar site such as Hotpads or Craigslist.
- Understand the contents and identify problems of each pages or the problems of organizational structure.
- Create a sitemap
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2. Perform a card sorting
- Listing card sorts
- Select potential card sorts to meet the application’s goal
- Select card sort method (online or manual)
- Perform cart sorting by choosing a group of participant, and identify the users
- Gather the participant’s results
3. Analyze the results from the card sorts
4. Present a new navigation of the application
- Depends on the outcome from the card sorting which could change to anew organizational structure of the application
- Create a sitemap of the new application structure/ new schemes
- Create a Flow diagram to describe how the system works
- Create a wireframe to present and define the new functionality of the application
- Do an usability testing