Improving user acquisition through a short-term house rental portal design.
Project Overview
It was a process of designing and building an MVP product from scratch for Wayhome, a short-term house rental company in Austin.
The design team work closely with the developer and real estate founder. We constantly engaged in discussing business decisions and translating it into the design decision.
Wayhome provides flexible fully furnished midterm (1-6 months) rentals in the Austin, TX area, ideal for families transitioning from out of state or looking to live in Austin temporarily.
After Kickoff meeting with the team, I discovered these interesting information about Wayhome as a business:
• Fully furnished houses, living on renters term. • Fit right in with the great moving trend to Texas. • Targeting at families of 3 or 4 • Opportunities for the house rental in suburb
Landing page
—— Sprint 1 ——
❓
Problem
Families moving to Austin need a transitional housing service.
🔑
Solution
A short-term housing rental service helps to accommodate all family members in a cost-effective way.
🕛
Timeline
THINK — 1 week MAKE — 2 weeks TEST — 2 weeks
User ResearcH
Secondary Research
Check out what I found out about the market.
🔍 Insight 01.
Fastest growing metro
3.8M people moved to Texas since 2010, compared to second place Florida (2.7 million), and California (2.3 million), according to population estimates.
🔍 Insight 02.
High percentage of migrants
16% of total population in Austin are migrants in 2019, which ranked No.1 in on Net migrants as a % of total population.
🔍 Insight 03.
Domestic Migration
67.4% Of the Austin MSA population change are domestic migration in 2019. Unlike some metros rely mostly on international migration including Miami, San Jose, Boston, and Washington.
🔍 Insight 04.
Californian & New Yorker
11.3% of the total in-migration to Austin are from California and New York, which is the highest among all the inter-states moving.
User ResearcH
Competitive Research
Competitive audit allows us to learn what competitors do well and what they could improve, which also inspires our design.
The design team meet with founder Jonathan and Micheal virtually to go through the package materials and business conversations. It gave us opportunity to be part of shaping the company objectives and have a deeper understanding of it.
🔬SWOT Analysis
Working on the SWOT analysis is incredible helpful for making sure the team is on the same page after the meeting. Having a truth sheet for the team to make design decisions and knowing the business objectives behind a feature is incredibly important.
ResearcH synthesis
Persona
Meet our user The Greens!
design
Information Architecture
🔒 Challenge
Limited listing in current stage
Due to the limited listing available to the user, Wayhome currently don’t have an all listing page. We need to have enough renter inquiry to be able to build up the house inventory, at the same time sufficient house inventory attracts more renters.
🔑 Challenge or Opportunity
How can we deliver the information in a friction free way?
- Screening renters with the survey - Customize listing selected by Admin in the back end - Send out customize listing through Email
design
Wireframes
Where is the best place for the survey sequence entry?
❌ Iteration 1
Bottom of the home page, anchor link to CTA
+ Reasonable browsing sequence: understand to action - Too casual and general
✅ Iteration 2
Pop up modal, link to CTA
+ Direct and intuitive, same as user expectation + Pop up modal align with current exclusive listing method + In the long term, easy to adapt into a “see all listing” layout
❌ Iteration 3
Pop up modal, link to CTA
+ Direct and intuitive, same as user expectation + Pop up modal align with current exclusive listing method + In the long term, easy to adapt into a “see all listing” layout
Design
Responsive Design
After discussing with the developer, the team decided to move on with bootstrap breakpoint integrated layout.
design
Sprint 1 Prototype
📱 Mobile Feature
Explore & Survey
Form input elements will be using bootstrap design system elements.
💻 Desktop Feature
Explore & Survey
Form input elements will be using bootstrap design system elements.
design & Iteration
Style Guide
build & test
Launch Website
Website officially launched on week 5. We are closely follow users response with Google Analytics.
- People click on the survey, stop at the location question; - Acquisition include key words “house rental near me”
🔑 Solution
- Search terms need to include the “Austin area” specific; - Exclude key word “near me” since our audience should be people trying to move in Austin
🎉 Result
After adjust key words, the first inquiry came in on Nov 22nd, 2021 !!!
build & test
Usability Testing
💡 Insights
Bedroom requirement should be a range instead of a specific number.
2 out of 4 participants find it confusing to select the number of bedrooms. If they need 3 bedrooms, they would also want to see house options with 4 bedrooms.
Retrospective
Sprint 1 Review
The design and development team mainly focus on the collaboration methods. We talked about what we should continue to do, what we should stop doing, what we should invert and what to act in the next sprint.
This review helped us to grow as a team also as individual designers.
user portal
—— Sprint 2 ——
❓
Problem
Families moving to Austin need a transitional housing service.
🔑
Solution
A short-term housing rental service helps to accommodate all family members in a cost-effective way.
🕛
Timeline
THINK — 1 week MAKE — 2 weeks TEST — 2 weeks
Research
Competitor Audit
Design team did a competitor feature audit together, each of use study 2 companies portal design in depth and share our finding in discussion session.
💡 Key Insights
- Focus on MVP for now, also keep long term development in mind.
- Different phase of the product development will decide what the current goal is, which will effect design decision.
- Responsive design is a must for all the features.
Research
User Journey
The whole team collaborate on the overall flow chart of three user groups. Overall flow chart include tasks of all these 3 groups of users:
👨👧👦 Renters
Fill inquiry, apply for staying, sign contract, manage stay
🏠 Property Owner
Listing property, admission for application, sign contract, manage property
📂 Real Estate Partner
Listing property, admission for application, transfer it to owner
design
User Flow
Since there are difference groups of users, the team member divided the workload into 3 parts. I will be focusing on the renters full flow.
design
Information Architecture
Information architecture of the 3 user portals essentially informed each other. Therefore the team collaborate on an open card sorting to understand what layout and templet to use for all the templet.
💬 Templet instead of pages
When the team is discovering what Information Architecture look like for 3 different portals. We keep template mindset in the designing process, instead of designing each individual page. This method not only keep the brand consistent, but also helped to accelerate development process.
💬 Content inform each other
As the overall flow diagram showed, the interaction through the 3 parties throughout the tasks will inform each other’s portal layout and content. For example, during the application process, the renters’ application form will be seen in the property owners’ portals with no editing function.
Design
Responsive Feature Adaptation
Responsive design is not just layout changing, but also feature adapting.
design
Sprint 2 Prototype
💻 Stage 1
Listing Review
User will be able to access their customize listing through email, then browse in the portal as a guest user.
💻 Stage 3
Staying
After renter moved in to Wayhome, the state change to staying. They will have access to both previous stay and current stay information.
💻 Stage 2
Application & Onboard
Users can sign up to access portal, then file application inside of the portal. For background checking and deposit charge, third part API will be used.
build & test
Launch Portal
The portal development was still ongoing as the internship ended. Some responsive design adjustment were made to adapt features to different devices, like the date picker, application sequences etc.
Ads policy does not allow region filter for housing related company.
Socials ads plays an important role in conducting the traffic. Due to the social ads policy, we can not reach the audience we wanted to.
🔑 Solution
Share button added for social marketing purpose
While we are working on the solution for the social ads challenge, we discovered people actually seeking help through social groups, and if you share the idea or listing inside of the group is not violating the policy
🎉 Result
Traffic conducted through social media without violating the policy
We started to share the listing page through Facebook rental groups, there are users showed great interest. The traffic continuously come from social media.
🎉 Impact
End user approved ordering flow.
The last round of usability testing on end users showed the significantly increased the task success rate. User acquisition improved through the rental portal design. The first inquiry came in on Nov 22nd, 2021 !!!
⏭ Next Step
Design strategy changing along with growth the business.
The design strategy or challenges should be constantly changing, effect by many factors, like the scale of the business, the change of demographics of the end users.
Retrospective
Takeways
📂 Business
Company’s business type and phase play an important role throughout design.
For startup company, limited of resource require UX designers to work around it. Sometimes, challenge can be turned into opportunities by differentiating the business.
💻 Development
Responsive design is not just layout changing, but also feature adapting.
I know responsive design in schools seems like fitting same content in different screen size, but in industrial project, it is also about feature adapting, device interaction adaption. It is interesting that responsive design seems like a whole new realm to explore.
🎨 Design
Usability testing helps designers to explore the product from different perspectives.
No matter how UX designer design the product, every user has their own interpretation of how it really works. Usability testing really helps designers to jump out of their own boxes and explore what users really thinking in real world cases.
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