Project Overview:
- Problem Statement
- Competitive Analysis
- Persona Model
- User Interviews
- Prototype
Problem Statement:
- A problem college students run into each year is finding off-campus housing. After freshman year, most students look into off-campus housing to find a place to stay for the duration of the school year. Finding a house has become increasingly difficult and our team wanted to develop a solution to solve this problem.
- We designed an application called ‘Housing Builder’ that allows students to look for housing and potential roommates. Our application enables landlords and students to advertise potential leases. Students can outline preferences for their school, roommate(s), bedrooms, bathrooms, parking, location, and rent price.
Competitive Analysis:
- Conducting a competitive analysis of Zillow, Realtor.com, Apartments.com, and Redfin allowed us to compare the core features, target audiences, strengths, and weaknesses of each platform. By evaluating aspects like search functionality, landlord tools, market insights, and content resources, we were able to determine opportunities for differentiation or improvement.
Persona Model:
- We created this persona model to represent our key user types and target audience. This persona model helped our team understand potential user needs, behaviors, goals, and pain points.
- Tyler is a driven and organized business student entering his junior year. He’s balancing a full class load, internship applications, and a part-time job, so finding reliable, compatible roommates is a top priority. He is looking for a clean, quiet living environment that supports his focused lifestyle. Tyler values clear communication, transparency in housing details, and tools that help him save time and make informed decisions.
User Interviews:
- User interviews are a vital method in UX research because they provide rich, qualitative insights into users’ needs, goals, and motivations. Through direct conversations, researchers can better understand what users truly want and why, which helps ensure the product solves the right problems.
- These interviews provided qualitative insights into what potential users would require in our application. By talking to users about their current experiences, we uncovered specific problems and barriers they encounter.