Lifestyle Homes | Mobile App
Problem
Many young home buyers, specifically, millennials want more than just a home, they want a lifestyle. This app gives home buyers the opportunity to search for homes on the market based on their lifestyle needs and preferences.
Solution
Beginning with research, surveying, and interviews with millennials the outcome led to a personalized home buying mobile app. The design choices reflect the target audience, use appropriate design patterns, photos, and written tone. Design has undergone three usability tests and the final prototype was based off of feedback.
Research
-
Case study of similar apps| Zillow and Redfin
-
Defining a Target Audience| Personas
-
-
Discoveries
My personas were a mixture of young people who were already homeowners, looking to buy and one that had never bought before but plans to do so soon.
I was able to represent a major user group for the app. My findings helped me to prioritize needs of younger home buyers, particularly millennials that have specific and different lifestyles than older generations.
I concluded the following needs:
Allow users to find a home that has been matched personally to their lifestyle.
Allows users to easily filter their needs based on other important factors such as price and location.
“How can I find my dream home and still be near all of my favorite activities?”
— Emily Blackburn, Home Buyer
Design Process
-
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
-
Wireflow
-
Static Mock
-
Prototype Overview
Final Solution
From my low-fi wireframes and wire flow, I built out a more detailed prototype to begin conducting usability testing. During testing, I was focused on a few key things:
The speed of my main user flow (the filter process) and if there were any hesitations from users while going through this flow
Ease of navigation or lack thereof
Was the information quick and easy to take in?
Conducting multiple rounds of usability testing after each iteration of my prototype was useful because the feedback helped me design the next iteration to achieve my overall goal: to make the home browsing process easy and personalized.
In order to move forward, substantial research and interviewing would need to be done to gain more data points on needs.