Improving students' trust and transparency in apartment hunting
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
Oct 2021 - Jan 2022
Tools
Figma
Team
2 Product Designers
OVERVIEW
Bruinshack helps UCLA students navigate housing.
Searching for housing at UCLA is a tedious and complicated process. There’s a plethora of information to sort through on student social media groups and from peers, and it’s difficult to tell what listings are legitimate or not. Bruinshack aims to be the go-to platform to help students through this process.
Problem
Students aren’t able to find adequate information to make informed decisions when looking for apartments, leading to high drop-off rates.
Solution
An apartment display page with clearer content and transparency.
BACKGROUND
Engagement on the ShackPanel, an apartment profile page, has been on the decline. Why?
According to our analytics team, our users haven’t really been engaging with the apartment pages in particular. Students aren’t following through with potential listings and reaching out with landlords/property owners.
RESEARCH
First, we conducted 10 interviews with students to look at how they’re navigating this page.
In our interviews with UCLA students of varying years and living situations, we asked about their current apartment-hunting experiences and in navigating Bruinshack, and then focused more on the ShackPanel page itself.
Key Takeaways
Navigation Difficulties
Users struggled to find relevant information easily in the unit description. This poses a barrier in being able to decide whether a specific listing fits their needs or not.
Transparency Gap
The apartment listings don’t include enough pictures or important details that students typically need to help fully determine if the apartment meets their needs. This availability of information impacts how much users view the legitimacy of the apartment.
Better Alternatives
80% of users used Facebook as their primary apartment hunting tool, with Bruinshack being an alternative choice.
How might we improve the way students are gathering information about an apartment in order to better establish trust and transparency?
EVALUATING CURRENT DESIGNS
I audited the current page with user insights in mind.
Using this research question as my north star, I then proceeded to evaluate different features on the page and what changes could be made to address the mentioned navigation and transparency issues.
DESIGN PROCESS
I explored design changes through low-fidelity designs.
I looked at different features on the page and what changes could be made to address the mentioned pain points.
Feature 1: Apartment Hero Display
Replacing the “View all photos” button, I decided that it would be much easier for users to be able to view the images within the page. Here, I thought about different ways the hero image could be displayed.
Feature 2: Clearer Distance Dropdown
Since users collectively agree that commuting time to classes is an important factor, I decided to include 2 additional landmarks on North and South Campus. To be mindful of spacing, I opted for a dropdown.
Feature 3: Unit Description
The amount of different filters (e.g. price, units) was overwhelming and required a lot of clicks, so I decided to simplify it to a filter based off of rooms. Also, to combat the text-heaviness of the description, I added icons and smaller sections to establish hierarchy.
Feature 4: Lease Information
Information regarding the lease, such as property information, application fees, pets, and parking, will be its own section. This is very pertinent information since students may have certain dealbreakers, so this addition would also promote transparency between apartment managers and students.
FINAL DESIGNS
I explored design changes through low-fidelity designs.
I looked at different features on the page and what changes could be made to address the mentioned pain points.
Apartment carousel
Quickly scan different images without having to leave the page.
Added campus markers
Check how long the commute is to your classes, whether it be in North or South Campus.
Cleaner Unit description
Parse through the details of a unit you’re interested in with ease.
New lease details
Find out more about the property and the lease.
RESULTS
Follow-up User Surveys
After the high-fidelity designs, we then sent out follow-up user surveys to see whether we were able to successfully address the issues we identified from our user research.
Next Steps
Due to the constraints and limitations from the project timeline, we weren’t able to flesh out certain aspects of the design and experience. Thus, for our next steps, we intend to tackle these goals in the next iteration.
Making the UX seamless on the landlord side.
At the end of the day, landlords themselves are entering in the information, so we need to ensure that the user experience for them to do so is seamless on this side as well.
Explore social components.
Unlike Bruinshack, Facebook has a social aspect where users can interact and see interactions such as likes and comments. Adding a similar social component could be worth exploring in fostering user trust.
REFLECTION
What I Learned
Building user trust.
There's no specific formula for establishing trust with users, but design can be the bridge to this. Building this relationship with users is key in user retention.
Understanding project limitations.
Given the limited resources of a student organization, it seems highly unrealistic to actually be able to fully replace Facebook as the go-to housing search platform, but what we can focus on is addressing problems within our reach.