“TRUST ESTATE”- A Landlord and Tenant Service Provider AppUX Design Case Study

Timeline: 6 Weeks Materials: Cards, Sticky Notes, Pen, Paper, Figma

UX Techniques Used: Competitor Analysis, Mind Mapping, User Personas, User Flows, Wireframing, Visual Design, Prototyping, Usability Testing

Design Process

UI/UX Design is a part and parcel of the product development process. It is what decides the future or success of your product. The best approach for a successful UI UX design is by combining the structure, content, and user experience in a certain way so that it enables your business to accomplish its goals.

Introduction

TrustEstate app is a service provider app for both landlords & Tenants where a landlord can easily sell or rent his/her own property by directly contacting to the tenant without facing brokers' support. Similarly, a tenant also can rent or buy a property without facing broker interference by directly contacting the landlord.

Let’s get started about how did I solve this problem,

First of all, I shortly introduce myself. This is Mithun Ray a Digital product designer. I’ve been working in this field last 2–3 years. In this journey, I worked on various products at different times with plenty of clients. In terms of those, I get a project offer from a USA client. According to his/her speech, he/she offered me a project, which was like,

“I want to design a product where a landlord & a tenant gets priority, such as they won’t get into trouble to sell, buy or rent a property and both of them (landlord & tenant) can watch their property by direct communication before choose without any third-party involvement.

I searched this kind of app, but I found that some app is only for landlord and some are for tenant only where they communicate through a third party for sell, buy or rent the property which I didn’t like. Because of how a broker person describes the property for sale or rent, the tenant doesn’t get as it is where there may have more problems with it.

So, in this case, scenario, I eager to design a product where tenants and landlords can buy, sell, or rent a property in their best interest by directly contacting each other and seeing the property by themselves.”

Research

My goal for this project:

1. Feature and flow comprehension
2. Ease of use
3. Discoverability and flagging user questions or concerns
4. Usability testing
5. Current user problems or difficulties
6. For tenants: Finding them a place to live and build their reputation without Brokers.
7. For the landlords: Finding them a good tenant, and also to get credibility.

Identifying the Candidates

I was scheduling 6 people for this stage. Among them 2 are landlords, 2 are tenants and 2 are brokers. I chose three types of people because we wanted to present three different characters involved in the rental, selling, or buying process. So that I can know all the small problems and also know which character works in which way. I participated in interviews with them directly.

Key Findings

Some key findings we got from the surveys and interviews:
The tenants were mainly 18 to 40 years old (85 people) and only 15 people (from the 40 to 60 age range). Landlords were mainly 27–60 years old, they were young professionals, and also there were families.

Questions

An interesting answer from the tenants was to find out 100% of the surveyed people share. Seems like not many people can afford a place only for themselves. A user interview always gets me scared, as people react to things differently, I tried to smile all through till my jaws were weak.

Tenants

1. How did you find a property you are renting?
2. Did you face any problems with rental, or buying a property?

Landlords

1. How did you give to rent or sell a property to a tenant?
2. What kind of good or bad experience for giving rent or sell to a tenant?

Brokers

1. What kind of process did you follow for the Tenant and Landlord?
2. How did you earn from the property rental, selling, or buying process?

User Personas

Firstly, I take interview two tenants who were 2 different people with different occupations.

Tenant (Student)

Tenant (Employer)

Tenants (Student)

Goal

1. To find an apartment at my college without having to check out multiple apartments
2. To properly view in details of an apartment in the app or website
3. I want to rent or buy a property without brokers.

Problem Statement

1. My house is far from my college, so when I went to college then I face traffic and too much money spends on car riding.
2. The property details and problem did not showing the brokers when I rent this.
3. I spend too much money and time for brokers to rent a property.

Tenants (Employer)

Goal

1. To find apartments for rent on weekends.
2. Would be nice to see if my current properties fit into this new apartment.
3. A nice apartment that suits my needs and not so far from where I work.

Problem Statement

1. The property details and problem did not show the brokers when I rent or buy this.
2. Can’t find apartments from brokers for the weekend.
3. I doubt if his current property's wood fit into the apartment seen.

Landlord (Businessman)

Secondly, I take interview one Landlord who was a Businessman.

Landlord (Businessman)

Goal

1. I want to find a good behavior person for tenants.
2. I want payment of the rent on time.
3. I want to see all proven documents of the tenant.
4. I don’t want to give money to brokers for giving rent.
5. I want to payment of the rent on time.
6. I want a tenant who will not bother any of my neighbors.

Problem Statement

1. I can’t find the tenants which person I like.
2. There were some tenants who did not pay the rent on time.
3. There were some tenants who were involved in various social and state crimes. They used to rent houses for some days for hiding.
4. I did a lot of money to brokers for finding tenants.
5. There were some tenants who did not pay the rent on time.
6. There were some tenants for whom the neighbors had to suffer a lot. They were pretty chaotic.

Identifying the Problem after complete users interview

1. Brokers show videos inside the house in such a way that there is no problem. But after buying the property, there are many problems.
2. Extra money is spent on these brokers. Because they have a lot of houses to sell. When they find a buyer, they show him all the houses. So sometimes the cost of going there and eating is to be borne by all the tenants.
3. If there are any problems at home, they are rarely seen by the brokers. Because they have a small number of houses and their main purpose is to sell them.
4. There are many problems to get a house according to the budget. Sometimes it is difficult to increase the budget.
5. It takes a lot of trouble to get home in the place of choice. Sometimes a lot of the property has to go to the broker. As a result, money and time both are wasted.
6. Sometimes after buying a house, the room space of the house is less according to the broker details.
7. Landlords can’t find the tenants they like.
8. There were some tenants who defiled the property and destroyed the environment.
9. There were some tenants for whom the neighbors had to suffer a lot. They were pretty chaotic.
10. There were some tenants who did not pay the rent on time.
11. There were some tenants who were involved in various social and state crimes. They used to rent houses for some days for hiding.

The goal of the project

Identifying the solutions

1. I wanted a tenant to be able to easily select and rent or buy a property of his choice without any brokers.
2. I wanted the to tenant will be able to see all the information about the property, like how many bathrooms, kitchen, bedrooms in this property, and will be able to see some pictures that can be seen also 360-degree view.
3. The tenant does not have to pay extra money for the brokers. Because have not any access for brokers in this app.
4. The tenant can also visit the property by contacting the landlord directly.
5. The landlord will be able to select the tenant by looking at the reviews and papers or contacting the tenant.
6. The landlord will be able to give rent or sell his property without brokers, that’s why the Landlord does not pay any more to brokers. So Landlord will get a handsome amount of money.

User Flow and wireframes

After getting all the information and data from the users and identifying the problem. I am able to draw user flow and wireframes that I could make sure that I am taking care of users' pain points with the current landlords and tenants' property buy, sell, or rent process. So that I could give a more user-centered prototype, below are some initial rough user flow and wireframes:

User flows for Tenant and Landlord

low-fidelity wireframes

low-fidelity wireframes

Finalizing one Hightfidelity wireframe prototype

After sketching many wireframes prototypes, I picked one that is easy to use and makes the user journey more meaningful. Below is the wireframe that I finalized:

High-fidelity wireframe prototype

Design & Testing

Logo, Branding, Colors, Typography, Component.

Onboarding

The main value of the onboarding process needs to serve, is to set initial expectations from the app, and to get the minimum information we need from the user in order to get started. I did this by showing a simple walkthrough and used forms that are as frictionless as possible with no need to type.

Select Service with Create Account process

What service you are looking for A Tenant service or A Landlord service. Easily select it and with creating an account perfectly.

A Tenant, How to search property with his fixed budget, You can select the address of your choice, property size, and many things.

A landlord, How to Advertising his a property and with facilities.

Design Testing

During the design process, I made sure to regularly get feedback from friends. I made micro-prototypes in InVision and asked them to do simple tasks, such as “Please advertising a property in your mind random things”. If they failed, I did changes and simplified my design until I got to a result that satisfies me.

I believe this concept is a good place to start. It implements good UX practices as a solution to a common problem, using the technology we have today, and it can dramatically improve user retention for this kind of apps. What I love about designing such products is that by increasing user retention.

Conclusion

Building a product from the ground up has been a great learning experience. I learned and discovered something new at every stage of the process.

From finding out the problem and validating it to conducting user research, preparing wireframes based on the identified user needs, and developing the UI for the app — the entire process has been highly rewarding (and just a little bit tedious)!

I found the design process, based primarily on the user needs and pain points discovered through research, very satisfying to work on.

The outcome of all the long hours spent trying to develop a minimal and easy-to-use app led to a potential solution that feels like it was always meant to be there.

Thank you for reading and I hope you found this insightful!

Don’t forget to find me if you like the story.

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