LIFESTYLE HOMES

Kristy Joseph

Founder and UX Designer

CONTENTS

• Project in short

• Discover and define through user research

• Persona

• Exploring

• Paper prototypes/ Iterations

• Back to the Drawing Board

• Competitive Analysis

• Feature prioritisation

• New concept

• Prototype

• Crucial Screens

The concept of Lifestyle Homes is to help home buyers find their perfect home. Most of the time this is a tedious job for people as they visit inspections over and over again and find it difficult to fit in with their work and personal schedules. Home buyers are able to find the time in between their schedules with Lifestyle Homes and find their perfect home.

Our goal here at Lifestyle Homes is to help you buy your perfect home.

MY ROLE I am the founder and User Experience Designer of Lifestyle Homes, albeit that is my role I also create the front end and interface design of pages within LH.

P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

Discovering the true problem meant I needed to go

further and find out what buyers are thinking and

feeling about their experiences with looking for a

home.

Main target audience was quite broad for research in

order cover all the research goals in my plan. I

conducted user interviews with home buyers of the

ages between 26 and 50. I then went on to analyse

their behaviours and answers.

D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A S E X P L O R I N G P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

ASSUMPTIONThe problem I suspect is that people who want to buy

a house are spooked or nervous as they have no way

of learning or building trust with their real estate

agents.

P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

KEY INISIGHTS:

1. Property buyers would take it upon themselves

to look for the perfect home instead of getting

help from an agent.

2. People were looking for a comfortable

environment in a home

3. Most buyers attend inspections without

knowing if the property is truly for them due to

their expectations not being met with what they

have seen online, and was a common issue

between users of different property apps

From my research, many points were brought up

during interviews which I then could use as either

pain points or findings which had not yet been

discovered and mapped these into categories.

P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

WHO AM I DESIGNING FOR

I decided to focus on the buyer as they are the

customer and without them the property industry

would not exist.

Hence

, the lo

vely E

lena →

Based on the synthesis from recent discoveries in my

research, one main user persona evolved..

P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

I further observed buyers using property apps like Domain and realeastate.com.au – as

they were the most named during interviews – to see their flow of direction. By

observing users in their natural environment I discovered the happy path they took to

get to their end goal of buying a house.

To analyse and understand their flow or happy path within apps, I drew up a user flow to

see were problems were arising. In doing this, I was able to visualise potential problems

and potential areas where I could help.

P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

People looking to buy a house need a way to understand if the property is right

for them before attending an inspection, because they don’t always match

expectations, leading to frustration and distrust.

Based on the buyers main issue of finding it hard to understand what the place

looks like from photos and their frustration of misleading content like images on

an app, I came up with a how might we statement;

How might we help them get a sense of a place so they have a better

understanding and know if they will like it in advance?

P R O J E C T I N S H O R T D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

PROBLEM STATEMENT

P A P E R P R O T O T Y P E S / I T E R A T I O N S D I S C O V E R A N D D E F I N E T H R O U G H U S E R R E S E A R C H P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

User testing with people on my paper

prototype – 4th iteration!

1. Assumptions

2. Confused about the meaning of features

3. Didn’t know when the tour of the house was

finished

4. Thought to scroll on recommendations page

5. Clicked on photo for full screen viewing of

house instead of house #

6. Clicked phone number on agent contact page

7. No swipe on full screen

8. No save button

9. Didn’t select VR

After feedback and user testing I decided to add particular features that needed to be in my

app where the user would not be confused about “how to use it”. Decisions were made for

the new and improved Lifestyle Homes App.

• Added a ‘save house to favourites’ but in our case I have called it ‘love’ – as the people I am

targeting are focused on lifestyle more than features per se.

• Put the features list on the same page as the question of ‘do you want features?’

Before I continued I needed to have a look at what my competitors where doing..

P A P E R P R O T O T Y P E S / I T E R A T I O N S B A C K T O T H E D R A W I N G B O A R D P E R S O N A E X P L O R I N G

P A P E R P R O T O T Y P E S / I T E R A T I O N S B A C K T O T H E D R A W I N G B O A R D C O M P E T I T I V E A N A L Y S I S E X P L O R I N G

P A P E R P R O T O T Y P E S B A C K T O T H E D R A W I N G B O A R D C O M P E T I T I V E A N A L Y S I S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

I wrote a list of what features would be nice, what

we needed to have and features we could have,

then did a feature prioritisation to decide what

should go on the app.

Based on my new features that are of high impact

and expected I added these to the list of needs

for the app and went on to create a user’s happy

path to buying a house.

CHANGES

1. I decided to get rid of the VR option on the mobile and made it a choice for the user to

purchase a realVR headset at a low cost. Also included a tracker after purchase so the

user is not left wondering where the package is.

2. Used the ‘what is most important to you?’, ‘do you want features’ and ‘location/GPS’ pages

as onboarding or first point of contact for new and existing users – easy for first time

users and quicker to get to the screen they need.

3. Decided to put Suburb, price range and bed, bath, parking on one page instead of two and

made it a filters page.

How could I get the user to continue with the purchase after they find out they

need to pay? – if the user does not receive the VR headset in the next 3 hours they can get

their money back.

N E W C O N C E P T B A C K T O T H E D R A W I N G B O A R D C O M P E T I T I V E A N A L Y S I S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

N E W C O N C E P T B A C K T O T H E D R A W I N G B O A R D C O M P E T I T I V E A N A L Y S I S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

N E W C O N C E P T B A C K T O T H E D R A W I N G B O A R D C O M P E T I T I V E A N A L Y S I S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

PROBLEMS

Users did not know about the VR until after they have selected a house # and on that individual

page of the house – this was way too many steps ahead of the process. I needed the user to

know about the VR headset from the start or at least think about purchase from the first point

of opening the app.

I then iterated and tested on my current concept and it worked! Users knew about the VR

headset right from the homepage and did not mind paying due to the low cost of a VR headset

compared to prices out there in the world.

N E W C O N C E P T P R O T O T Y P E C O M P E T I T I V E A N A L Y S I S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

BLUE new user

ORANGE existing user

N E W C O N C E P T P R O T O T Y P E C R U C I A L S C R E E N S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

ONBOARDING

N E W C O N C E P T P R O T O T Y P E C R U C I A L S C R E E N S F E A T U R E P R I O R I T I S A T I O N

SCREENTOVR →

REVISED

WIREFRAME

SITEMAP of Lifestyle Homes

PROTOTYPE URL

Check it out for yourself and try the interactive prototype I created ☺

https://xd.adobe.com/view/c43dbd58-d21b-4b17-499b-b7c5c6c94a33-b20c/