Cribcritiq

Timeline:

Feb - Apr 2023

Team:

Chinmayee Channuri - UX Designer

Sarvesh Subramanian - PM

Aaryan Sagar & Sarayu Chebbi - Engineers

Tools:

Figma, FigJam, Procreate

THE PROBLEM

Students at the University of Texas at Austin find the process of finding housing difficult and tedious.

As an incoming sophomore at UT, I faced this problem first-hand, where I found it overwhelming to assess the multitudes of housing options available to me. There aren’t reliable, seamless, and trustworthy resources available for UT students to help them choose the right apartment. 

This project is a part of my experiences as a Design Fellow at Texas Product Engineering Organization.

THE SOLUTION

An official website that allows users to filter, review, save, and compare their favorite apartments securely. 

COmpetitive audit

To understand the industry space, I analyzed 3 popular websites which cater to the housing space using Nielsen’s Heuristic Principles. 

Airbnb was analyzed even though it is not catered towards a college student since it is one of the most formidable websites for users to find temporary housing in the market today. The other two are UT Specific. 

The competition does not have a direct Comparison feature that allows users to compare listings.  

I found that the two websites catered to UT do not offer the option for users to review housing listings. Moreover, the filtration systems they offer were too complicated for a young college student user. 

User interviews

The Product Manager of our team and I interviewed 15 UT students who lived or were planning to live off-campus. 

Research Questions: 

  1. Which type of residence did you live in / are you looking for? 

  2. Walk us through your process of deciding upon this residence location

  3. What resources did you mainly rely on to find out information about this residence? 

  4. What do you prioritize when looking for housing? 

  5. If you already know where you’re staying next year, did your process change at all from when you picked a place last year? 

  6. What were your impressions of your house-hunting process overall?

  7. How would you make your house-hunting process easier?  

Role:

UI/UX Design, UX Research, Branding, Prototyping

Main insights

None of the previous resources my interviewees used integrated the save listings and comparison features. They did not provide a reliable system for reviewing either. 

User Personas

From there, the PM and I developed 3 personas based on the user research conducted. 

JUMPING INTO DESIGN

Based on feedback from mentors, users, and my PM and engineers, I continually iterated my design from low-fidelity to high-fidelity. We conducted Usability Testing at each fidelity stage.

LOW FIDELITY

I started off with sketching rough drafts of the low-fidelity ideas for the Search Page and the Apartment Landing Page.

For Usability Testing, these sketches have been transferred onto my iPad for clarity. Here are the results:

TESTING & IMPROVING — MID & HIGH FIDELITY

Here are three major features I integrated in CribCritiq after multiple phases of Usability Testing: 

the final product

Presenting CribCritiq

pitch deck
DESIGN SYSTEM
LOOKING BACK — lessons learned

This was my first full-stack design project working alongside a team of product manager engineers, and we were able to create real-time impact.

User insights must be accounted for throughout the process ▷

As we prioritized user research by conducting usability testing at multiple fidelity stages, this project was heavily user-insight-driven. I referred to these ideas during the design process, which allowed for smooth iteration. 

The Gravity of User Personas in Product ▷

Classifying our User Research findings into Personas allowed for cohesive storytelling, which we weaved throughout all stages of product ideation, design, and development. 


Optimization of UI Design ▷

Since this project was a full-stack collaboration, it was important to consider all Web Design UI layout and accessibility guidelines. This included focusing on spacing, margins, padding, addition of negative space, color theory, etc.