Rightmove

Interactive prototype for people who want to connect to their new city

Role: UI/UX Designer

Year: 2023

Background

People move for a variety of reasons. They could be emigrating to a new country; perhaps they’re moving for a new job or for school. Moving is a big deal, and while it can be rewarding, it can also be an incredibly stressful event for people.

For the most part, moving isn’t something that happens every day, nor does it happen overnight. There’s a lot that needs to be considered, and this seemingly simple topic can be broken down into three major parts — before, during, and after a move. Explore the problem space from as many perspectives as possible to identify differences and overlaps shared between them.

Goals

The main goals for this project were to sharpen my design skills for DesignLab’s Bootcamp and overall look at why people move, how they establish their own community when moving to a new city, and the biggest struggles of the entire moving process.

Problem

Moving’s overall challenges encapsulate 3 stages: Pre-moving (gathering boxes, packing, etc), Moving (the actual travel, unpacking), and Post-moving (settling into your community).

My Impact

I wanted to tackle this problem head-on and understand the ins and outs of what people struggled with mainly at each part and see where I could bridge the research with the most efficient way people could tackle the problems.

Research

Goals

  • We want to learn the current timeline of how long it takes on average for people to reach out to their community so that we can better understand loneliness trends.

  • We want to learn where in the process people take into account the community so that we can better formulate community events/activities earlier in the moving process.

  • We want to learn people’s motivations for moving so that we can better understand where the community falls on their priority list.

Competitive Analysis

User Interviews

Research Synopsis

Ideate

Low-Fi Wireframes

Prototype & Test

Methodologies

Quantitative

  • Surveys were sent out to 10 participants to better understand moving and what challanges that overcame before, during, and after their move.

  • The survey focused on looking for certain pain points that could be used for further research later.

Interviews

  • We conducted interviews with 4 individuals over Google Meet

  • Main Insights: Individuals experienced a higher level of loneliness when moving without a support system or friends in place

POVs

  • I’d like to explore ways of building community for individuals unfamiliar with their new city. People expressed that their overall loneliness rating dropped significantly once they found their niche crowd in their new city.

How Might we Statement

  • How might we bridge the gap between online and in-person human connection with our product?

Define

User Personas

The Lo-Fi wireframes focused more on the overall UI design and not the content to begin with.

UI Kit

Color Palette

Qualitative

  • Interviews were conducted over Google Meet over the course of 2 weeks with 5 participants from all across the US.

  • Main feedback from these interviews were people experienced more emotional/psychological problems post-move as they tried to set up new friend connections.

High Fidelity Prototypes

Usability Testing

Measuring success for this testing required the users to use the product with the lease amount of pushback or roadblocks as possible. Overall users rated the experience a 4⁄5 overall and only experienced some hiccups due to design challenges and non-functional form entry tasks.

I hypothesized that time would be the biggest challenge for users as user fatigue with over complicated form entries would be the hardest things for users to overcome. This thankfully did not happen and most users completed all the tasks under 10 minutes as given for the allotted time.

Key Points

  • Users successfully completed the tasks in a reasonable amount of time

  • Users did find the RSVP aspect of the task less than ideal

  • Users wanted more options to add rsvp or moving events to their external calendars

Stakeholder Management:

This project helped me align with future stakeholder management as my design mentor pointed out many potential features that would be more costly to implement in-house and rather pivot to looking at integrating existing or local services that could be added onto the app. This pivot helped me align the expectations of the app and understand it as more of a marketplace rather than an app that needed to have so many in-house features that diluted the overall experience.

Future Project Goals & What I Could have Done Differently:

As I am this far into my certification with multiple projects under my belt I have a better grip of what design should look like and making the design sleeker and more streamlined rather than busy with too much color is something I will implement in my future designs.

For this current project, I do believe I could easily create a better UI with the current knowledge under my belt and could streamline some of the processes within the application itself to better suit customer and stakeholder needs.

Conclusion

Personal Aspect:

This project showed me the whole process of what being a UX Designer looks like. I truly learned a lot from DesignLab in my first solo project and this brought me the spark to keep going and pursue my certification.

Logo Design