We started this project by asking ourselves: what is a common issue that people face which we can attempt to solve?
One of the issues that came to my mind was affordable housing. I had heard from many people how difficult and frustrating the apartment hunting process was.
Our group decided to tackle this topic as it was something we could all relate to: each of us had to find a place to live while having a busy life as a student.
I conducted interviews from 3 different users to help kickstart our research process. In each of my interviews I asked about their latest apartment hunting experience, their latest touring experience, what they look for in an apartment, their current living situation, and their experience with the landlord.
The interviews were a great way to get insight into more than just the digital aspect of house hunting. The one flaw was not being able to see the websites and tools people used to conduct these searches. This is however, where the next method used comes in handy.
I conducted 2 contextual inquiries to help gain more insights on how students use websites. I had participants search for apartments using a website of their choice, and guide me through the process.
The first person I observed was Sakshi, an international student in the MS Information Science. What stood out to me was:
The second person I observed was Donald, the same person I interviewed earlier. What stood out to me was:
To help expand our research, we sent out a survey asking students about their apartment hunting process and living situation. This helped confirm our findings, but was a little surprising as I wasn’t expecting that many people to have the same issues.
Results can be found below:
Following our individual user research, our group came together to synthesize the data and discover the key findings.
We organized our findings into an affinity diagram in order to better ascertain the key ideas. We found that the biggest issues lied in website information, communication, and the journey of finding an apartment.
We created personas, a representation of our use population. We decided to make 2, one for domestic students, and one for international students, since we had happened to interview a lot of international students.
The key ideas we got from each persona were their values.
The domestic student valued location, affordability, being able to contact landlords, and being able to view the apartment on a map.
The International student found hurdles communicating with landlords and navigating documents.
Our group created a user journey map based off of the domestic student persona. We choose this persona over the international student because we felt it was more representative of the general student population.
For me, the opportunities section was the most exciting, as it gives us a lot of ideas for our prototype and draws a lot from the pain points users faced.
For more details on the project, see the deliverables below:
UX Research PlanA presentation outlining the research we conducted. This shows the research methods we used and the desired outcomes.
Design BriefA presentation outlining. This presentation includes a few items I decided not to include in this case study for brevity. We created an experimental outline for an AB and created project goals using the Heart Framework. These artifacts will serve as well when we start prototyping ideas for an application to help alleviate many of the issues we saw in our user research.
We found that many students found the apartment searching process overwhelming and confusing. There are a lot of listings, amenities, and factors to navigate, not to mention the fact that some websites had inaccurate information.
Our next steps are the prototyping stage, where we plan to come up with a way to search for apartments in a more efficient and accurate manner.
