Flatgenie-Home finding app (product design)
‘Flatgenie, a home finding app’ which is focused upon individuals who are looking for a house/shared room /tenants/roommates. It’s an app that involves a community-building concept. A centralized theme circulates around finding rooms but the idea is to diversify into meeting user necessities such as buying medicines, booking a cab, checking a nearby theatre, or shopping in near future.
Finding a room isn’t a cakewalk. It’s always a struggle because lots of factors come into the picture. It may include room rent, roommates, distance, food, and whatnot. You can’t visit every place and look for all the necessary amenities because that takes an enormous amount of time and effort. In order to make things easier, we came up with the idea — ‘Flatgenie, a home finding app’.
Evolution of Flatgenie
One of my friends approached me with the idea of building an app that allows people to find rooms/roommates in tier 1 cities. Originally, the idea was to create a simple product similar to tinder but here you would discover houses instead of people. Eventually, I worked on developing ‘Flatgenie’ for almost one week but the work came to a halt once my friend decided to cease this project due to personal reasons.
My inability to give up on something that I already started working on, pushed me to continue working on the ‘Flatgenie’ project single-handedly. I worked on the app as a product designer and pivoted from the initial idea of implementing a tinder-like app to something more feasible and desirable. The new approach that I formulated will be discussed in the following sections.
The goal of the project
The purpose of this project is to make things easier for homeowners to find tenants and vice versa. The project also allows an individual to discover the roommate’s personality beforehand. Thus, encouraging him or her to pick a place as per individual’s compatibility.
I further expanded the project around the community-building concept. Anybody could now live in a place and can find solutions for all their needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, medical care, tickets to nearby events). I believe there is a lot of scope for integrating other in-app services once we roll out Flatgenie.
What does success looks like?
For any user - finding the space with an easy onboarding process
For the business - an opportunity to establish the brand and services focused around Millenials who basically drive the digital market. Carving out a niche user base will be challenging for us here.
For the product team - an opportunity to build a usable, delightful experience and create a better product by employing best practices.
“Product design is about creating something right for your customer by completely understanding what they feel, what they think, and what they want. But ultimately, designing a product means designing something that sells.” ~ Scott Hurff
I followed the process that involves requirements gathering, Designing alternatives, Prototyping, and Evaluation. I evaluated my work, time and again and made appropriate changes wherever needed.
In requirements gathering, I tried to understand existing room-seeking practices, our target audience, and their needs. I was able to create a user persona and User story cards to design the product more effectively by making few assumptions about the target audience. For the UI/UX design, I employed best practices and easy flows.
Understanding business goals, users & their goals
Business goals
People who vacated their homes/flats in early march before lockdown(Mar 2020) may head back in the month of Jan-Feb 2021. once they come back and start searching for a place let’s pitch the idea of renting spaces. We want our product to be a breeze of fresh air post covid lockdown and want people to enjoy each other’s company at ease. We were thinking about adding at least 100 spaces filled with our facilitation done between the owners and rentee. And also we may want to be one of the leading companies in the sector.
who are the users?
Most of the millennials, born towards the end of the 1990s and are in the age range between 20–35 years old. The majority of them are working professionals.
What are their possible(users) goals might be?
From the rentee perspective, a goal might be to find an inexpensive room /house for rent near the office or anywhere as per personal requirements. Other goals may include sharing space as a roommate, easy paperwork with landlords/owners, useful facilities in the neighborhood, and Roommates who share more or less the same values and enthusiasm. From the house owner’s perspective goals might be, finding tenants who pay dues on time and someone who abides by tenant's obligations if any.
I have created user stories by analyzing our target users and mapped these user stories into features that we can implement while developing the product.
App structure, user flow(s)
Experience design
Onboarding screens
The user onboarding experience is the first impression new users have regarding your product. it’s a make-or-break experience for new users(source: app cues blog).
Onboarding is a gist of the product that introduces new users about app usability and its probable accomplishments. Thus the idea is to create an onboarding flow to educate users and prepare them(contextually) to use some of our features(ex — adding classifieds, changing location, etc) if not all.
Login, signup
Login & signup flows are very important to keep track of the activities of a user and also help in providing a personalized experience. Flatgenie’s login & signup flows follow standard flow’s that you see in other apps. A first-time user can signup using just his phone number where a one-time password is sent to his phone number which gets automatically detected and the user is signed up! Just like that :). A user can also make use of the social login feature(signup through google currently).
Main sections of the app
Flatgenie app has 4 main sections - they are home section, explore section, convos¬ifcation, and lastly profile. In the home section(section 1), I have added property listings, classifieds, search bar, and horizontally scrollable sections(which are divided into property types) and also we have filters. We will also add some sections such as recommended properties, sponsored ads, and nudge cards to fill profile and post requirements if any.
section 2 explores (which currently not on cards to develop). The idea was to build this app not only for house renting and finding but also for doing many things like booking movie tickets, or buy groceries or check local events and buy tickets for that. This is a very broad idea to implement but needs to run some MVP experiments to establish the needs and permutation and combinations whether this model will work or not.
Section 3 holds conversations(messages) that are initiated when a user has asked for a property visit or just made a general inquiry.
section 4 is the profile section which contains general information about the user and some personal information that helps us to better match users.
Classified, property listing & its details
Classifieds are free adverts that can be used to post property requirements by tenants. A tenant has to answer few questions about the property, budget, etc. these requirements are posted into the classified field and are discovered by homeowners/roommates. The interested one can directly contact the user (tenant). The idea is not to restrict the homeowners/roommates to browse beyond one’s requirements.
property listings include posts by house owners, agents, people who are looking for flatmates. The property card( post ) presents a brief introduction about the owner and the property images. Once the user clicks the property card( post )- the property description page opens up. This description has minute details regarding the place, the owner, amenities, neighborhood, etc.
Schedule visit, contact owner
The UI allows tenants to schedule his/her visit to the property or can directly contact the owner. To schedule a visit a tenant has to select the date and time of the visit and is later approved by the house owner at one’s convenience. similarly, the tenant can also directly text the owner and schedule things accordingly.
Property listing flow by owners
House owners can post either on the property listing page or in the profile in the ‘my listing section’ This flow involves answering few questions which helps tenant while making decisions. Few basic questions such as property/house locality, rent, amenities, etc will be questioned to the house-owners.
Thank you for reading my UX case study. I started working on Flatgenie considering it as a simple project but along the journey, the project unraveled itself into many business opportunities. I experimented with the app structure and design methods without compromising the experience.
This product has scope beyond what is mentioned above. This may include furniture renting business model, house renting document provider service. The possibilities are endless. As of now, I would like to keep this as a platform where you can find a place.
I extend my gratitude to creators from unsplash.com and pinterest.com for providing images that made this case study legible and engaging. I am grateful for all those who provided feedback and didn’t hold back questioning my design decisions.
