Background and Challenge
Given my personal experience of moving house 3 times in the last 6 months (in Covid times!) and hearing from friends and family about how painful and frustrating this process cane be, I wanted to explore the opportunity of how to make this process easier and at least a little less stressful.
Zoopla is one of the UK's leading aggregators of property listings data, giving free access to information on 27,000,000 homes, up to 1,000,000 property listings and 15 years of sold prices data.
In 2018, it was bought by a US private equity firm, and half way through the project they launched a re-brand which aims “to support its huge plans for the product and digital experience."
Given Zoopla’s continuous growth, I took on a challenge to help their users with the home search and advance the opportunity for Zoopla to make a difference for their users.
High level goals
1) Design a new property search management feature that embeds within the current Zoopla website and their design.
2) Design additional feature that could enhance user experience of finding a property that fits their criteria.
3) Improve IA and navigation
Timeline
4 weeks, 80 hours of work
Team and Role
Self-directed as a solo UX designer.
Note that this is a conceptual project.
Getting as many general insights as possible
I experienced moving houses a lot, and so did my friends. And it has always been a daunting process but I didn't know how people approached the search, where their journey began and what mattered to them so I dived into the research to learn all about that.
I started by
surveying friends and family who live in the UK
to learn more about general
moving house habits and the
reasons behind the move.My initial assumptions were around lack of information and clear picture about the property which were validated as 44.8% of participants did not find the information they needed on the search website.
"Frustrating to not know the neighbourhood and having to then do lots of research around particular streets and amenities."
"Our current flat has a lot of problems. We wouldn’t have taken it and the landlord would probably have to have sorted it out if the previous tenants were able to leave a review."
"It would be great to bring some more independent information, as currently it's entirely one-sided from the agency/landlord's perspective."
Participants
Age: 26-42
Location: UK
Criteria:
- Moved houses at least once
- Uses online search to find a new house
- Located in the UK
Surveys: 31; Interviews: 6
Understanding why and how people move houses
Once I had the qualitative data, I continued with in-depth interviews to discuss the suggested feature list to understand the motivations behind the choice and how/why the chosen feature is going to help the users.
What I did not anticipate is that users have no control over response time and viewings, leading to difficulties when trying to keep track of appointments.
"Most annoying: when you find a property and can't contact directly who is offering (filling a form and wait to be contacted)"
"I can't contact directly who is offering"
"I hate that I have to contact estate agents individually to arrange viewings."
Following user along the Customer Journey Map
To visualise the process of moving houses, I mapped out the user journey and shadowed the user along the way. With the clear idea of what stages the user faces hurdles at and what causes these hurdles, I created the list of opportunities.
Frustrations😫 and How Might We Help🚀
Agencies don’t mention enough details to get a sense of how spacious/modern/loud/safe the place is, what the bills and other extra costs are.
Not able to find information about the area, so would either drive around or stay in the area to get a feeling of it.
Star system from previous tenants on general objective information (noise, warmth, neighbours, space, problems with an accommodation, response from a landlord).
Having to do their own research via Google and Google maps to find information about supermarkets and other necessities in the area, public transport links, safety of the area
Hard to book viewing appointments and keep track of all the information in one place
Instant booking system with a confirmation, property details, route, and visual reference to a place.
Profile with interests/work/hobbies/ projects
Profile section with favourite content.
Having to wait to hear back from the agency to make an appointment.
Flowing to find a property and leave a review
I mapped out the user flow which includes property search, extended profile with viewings and a flow to write a review.
Defining features
Having analysed solutions and constraints, I prioritised:
the viewing booking feature - to tackle the problem with long response time from agencies. This will also allow users to see if the property is still available straight away;
past tenants reviews - with hopes that this will give inside information about the property that agencies don't ever mention (the neighbours have 5 dogs? no, thank you!)
When I started designing the review form, I went back to my interview scrip and realised that quite a few mentioned that they often wasted their time commuting all the way down to the viewing only to realise that it is not suitable. The reason: the property looks nothing like the advertised photos.
"What I dislike about the moving process is that it massively time-consuming - I waste my time commuting to a place which looks different."
"Details and pictures are not clear so you’d have to go in and check and waste time because the flat was not representable."
With that in mind, I decided to include a separate review form for those who viewed a property.
Past tenant reviews
_cr.png)
Past viewing reviews
.png)
If I was to take this project further, I'd consider exploring the following insights:
Participants valued the section about the Area as it could save time on search outside the platform. Next step can be to develop the “Area” section to give more information and insights.
Participants want to be able to evaluate the costs of the bills/overall extra costs. The information about this can be gathered as a one-time pop-up when a user logs in (“how much are your average bills?”) and added as “x number of tenants said their average bills are under £40”).
Participants reacted positively to the new review features. They mentioned that this boosts their loyalty to Zoopla as a trustworthy resource to find verified properties.
Participants mentioned the convenience of having all listings/viewings/homes in one place. This can serve as a base to create a property management tool.
I'd continue testing various test input variations to find the most straightforward way to encourage users to leave reviews. Some explorations are:
No numbers
Icons
Reflections and Learnings
Tedious problem space does not mean tedious solutions
I realised that often we don't need to go far to find the most painful problems. Being able to follow users along on their journey worked as a powerful method to uncover the exact points they start struggling.
Consider both sides
Since this is a hypothetical project, I focused solely on type of end users - the tenants; however, in reality, if I was to work with Zoopla, I'd need to consider business goals and other user type (eg agents who utilise Zoopla) to find the most suitable solutions and make best decisions.
.svg)
