Startup  ·  2015

Homewalla

To design a mobile app that help landlords and tenants manage communications, rental expectations, and maintenance seamlessly.

Techniques

Surveys, User Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews, Competitive Analysis, Personas, User Scenarios, Feature Prioritisation, Sketching, Paper Prototyping, Usability Testing.

 My Role

I led the landlord's experience and was responsible for conducting user research, creating user journey maps, and sketching user flows. The final result was an interactive prototype built in POP3 that allowed us to demonstrate key user flows.

Goal

Develop an minimum viable product (MVP) for a mobile app to address problems existing in the rental management space in a two-week sprint.

Tools Used

Sketch, Axure, Invision

Project Duration

2-3 weeks

Devices

Mobile

Background

Our client, Homefyndr, was developing a mobile application that provide a more personalised experience for people to find homes based on their unique needs, personal interests, social habits and travel preferences.

During their development phase, they realised there was a gap in the management phase of the property rental lifecycle.
Therefore, we were tasked to develop an minimum viable product (MVP) by applying user-centred concepts to design an app codenamed, "Homewalla" that addressed this gap and complement their existing product in a two-week sprint.

Discovery

As this concept was unexplored and not much prior research had been done. We focus on research and validation which are key to our design concepts.

Our first step was to confirm the three hypothesis that were outlined during client briefings. To do this, we conducted a competitive analysis, sent out 2 surveys and conducted three interviews each of landlords and tenants.

Findings

Using the data we collected from surveys and interviews, we looked at frustrations and problems both landlords and tenants were facing throughout their renting journey.

• We discovered eight high-level pain points that tenants and landlords face.
• Three biggest pain points we found were communication, expectations and automated payments.
• We also identified three major landlord segments in the current rental market.

Scope

From our research, the primary focus was on landlords who self-managed their rental property for long-term as it ties with the business model of homfyndr. Short-term landlord that uses online rental services like Stayz or Airbnb are out of scope as they don’t sign leases.

Additionally, potential users of homewalla could be agents as they may like to manage their existing properties or communicate with their tenants better.

The Competition

We also wanted to know what platforms and products already served the rental management and services spaces. We looked at similar platforms along the spectrum of rental management and home services. Four of the best examples we found were Cozy, RentingSmart, Pillow, and TaskRabbit.

MVP Features

With the scope in mind, we used the user research and competitive analysis to prioritise potential features and determine what was needed for a minimum viable product.

We knew there were 3 main drivers of frustration:

• Problems with communication, expectations, and payments.
• Using the feature prioritisation, we looked at those 3 drivers and selected the features that would best address those pain points.

Target Audiences

Now that we had the features narrowed, affinity diagram and conducted a persona workshop, we developed four experience maps from our primary personas to understand their thoughts and behaviour across the renting experience. With the personas developed, we used an experience map showing multiple touch points across the user journey and how frustrations were addressed with the mobile app.

Creating a Delightful Onboarding Experience

We incorporated some concepts inspired from successful property apps e.g. airbnb, cosy, pillow, etc that had worked well into our design to provide a delightful experience for users.

We found that onboarding was quite a lengthy process e.g. property details, welcome kit, rental information.

Breaking these journey into smaller steps and providing helpful tips and progress indicators provided better experience for the user.

Testing & Findings

We conducted three rounds of usability testing, the results were overall positive with a few improvements that helped us finalise our sketches for the Homewalla app.

Tenants:

• Love automated payments.
• Common questions and tips are very helpful, especially when setting things up.
• Highlighting the key features at the beginning helped users understand the app’s purpose.
• Photo and chat functions were intuitive and easy to use.
• Users should view the home screen sooner upon downloading.
• The name homewalla is confusing.
• Tenants would not pay for the app.

Landlords:

• Landlords would prefer to pay a commission-based fee. If the app could find tenants and prove valuable, they would be happy to use it.
• Landloards liked having a single property detail page and central point.
• Welcome kit should be renamed “Tenant Welcome Kit”. Make it clear at each stage that it is for the tenants’ benefit.
• Provide more details on the tenant/ landlord interfaces. What information is flowing to and from the tenants?
• Need very clear confirmations when you’ve entered details successfully.
• Provide an introduction screen for landlords to explain what they need to do and what features the app can provide.

The clients, Homefyndr, are working on further development of the idea, and hopefully will launch later this year.

Reflections...

Always good to get your clients onboard early.

Brief do change from time to time.

Scope out requirements early.

Communicate with stakeholders regularly.