Finding ideal living space — case study

Andrian Soelistiyo
7 min readApr 19, 2021

UX Designer Exercise

Finding ideal living space

Nowadays, a lot of people migrate to other cities for different purposes. It could be for looking for a better work environment, pursuing higher education, or building a new family. And a place to live is one of the basic necessities of human life. In each purpose, they need to find the space to live that supports their daily activities.

Tasks

  1. Problem identification: identify problems and build hypotheses
  2. Bold ideas: bold ideas and how those ideas solve the problem
  3. How you tell all your processes to achieve your design solution
  4. Your knowledge about the platform that you’re designing

Duration : 5 days

Design Thinking

In order to answer that question, I first needed to have a process outline that can help me stay on my lane during the incredibly extensive phases.

The tools that I use for my research, ideation, and prototyping are Zoom, Draw.io, and Adobe XD respectively.

Empathise

User interview

For the user interview stage, instead of having an online survey, I decided to interview my friends to get a more thorough and detailed answer.

Out of the 7 respondents, 5 are around 25 to 27 years old with a bachelor’s degree, 1 is around 31 years of age, and 1 is around 35 years old of age.

Before conducting user interviews, I have to determine the data I want to collect, as follows:

  1. Demographic (like age, address, status, education, and interests & hobbies)
  2. Profession (like job, place of work, monthly income, and position level)
  3. Frequently used devices
  4. Frequently used applications
  5. Type of ideal living space
  6. Criteria of ideal living space
  7. Important factors that need to be considered from ideal living space
  8. The process of finding ideal living space
  9. Pain points or frustrations when finding ideal living space
  10. Application or site to find ideal living space
  11. The features you use the most when using the application
  12. Pain points or frustrations when using the application

Then, I can create questions for user interviews.

Define

To define the users, I simplified the information we got from the first stage (Empathise). I did this by doing these steps:

  1. Categorise the patterns using Affinity Mapping.
  2. Narrow the Top Finding.
  3. Then create User Persona and User Journey Map.

Affinity mapping

User Motivation
User Opinion on Ideal Living Space
User Behaviour
User Opinion About the App or Site

Top finding

Top Finding

How might we

How Might We (HMW) is a method to change the problem that we found into challenges and actionable statement.

How might we?

User persona

After affinity mapping is complete, I can create user persona. I created three different user personas, based on the type of ideal living space they chose.

  1. David is looking for a house
David user persona

2. Daniel is looking for an apartment

Daniel user persona

3. Sarah is looking for a dorm

Sarah user persona

Information architecture

Based on the insights gained from the initial content audits, and competitor analyzes, I defined the sitemap for Living App.

Information architecture

User flow

User flow is a comprehensive process or steps that users do to reach their goals/their objective when using this product. Here is the user flow for Living App:

User flows have been done, it’s a crucial part before you create wireframe/lo-fi design, because I have to make sure that every scenario works well.

Ideate

Lo-fi design

Onboarding

Home page:

  • There’s slider banner on the first section, so user can easily know what’s new or live event on this app.
  • The second section is main feature. There are home, apartment, and dormitory.
  • The last section is dynamic feeds.
Find a house

Find a house:

  • User can choose buy or rent a house.
  • At search feature, now user can type the location like “lippo” and some suggestions will show up on the screen.
  • Or user can use the accurate location feature, then user can choose from province, then city, and the last one is area (third screen).
  • The fourth screen if user choose rent, rent duration type will show up, user can choose daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.

Then find an apartment and find a dormitory are the same as find a house. But there is no option like buy or rent in the find a dormitory page. I think i will next to search result page.

Search result find a house

Search result find a house:

  • The first screen there is a total of house in Lippo Karawaci area on top navbar.
  • The second and the third screen User can use filter or sort feature to find the best result.
  • The first screen is search result page when user choose buy, then the fourth screen is search result page when user choose rent.
Product detail find a house

Product detail find a house:

  • The first screen user can see image product, video product, and 360 view of the product. There is a Hitung KPR button for calculate a simulation of KPR. And there are tabs, contains Informasi umum, Informasi lokasi, and Tren harga, user can easily direct to their section.
  • The second screen is a detail of the house like type, developer, etc.
  • The third screen is detail location around the house, user can know how far public transportation, school, market, etc from this house.
  • The fourth screen is the price history data about this area, user can choose 5 years ago or 10 years ago. This feature helps user to know the prospect of this area.
Bookmarks and chat

Bookmarks:

  • There are list of products that has been bookmarked. User can see the product from tab categories.

Chat:

  • There are list of chats. User can ask more detail to the sales marketing about the house, or ask more detail to the owner about the dormitory.

Design system

Design System

Consistency in design is a must, so i create a mini design system to helps me create hi-fi design.

Hi-fi design

Hi Fi Design

Conclusion

There are many lessons while working on this case study. The most exciting process is when I do a user interview. See a problem from the user’s point of view, there are many things that I have never thought before. That’s why I need to know the real problem from users when they’re looking for the ideal place to live.

But I can’t confirm this design is the best, because I’m an UX Designer, I’m not a user, so I still need validation from users. In part 2, I will continue this article and I will talk about Prototyping, and Testing.

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Andrian Soelistiyo

A simple man who really love about tech, design, sport, and automotive. Car, and football enthusiast.