Role: User Researcher and Interaction Designer
I was contracted to be a part of an enjoyable UX Design team at Grabhouse.com, a broker free house rental startup. The main objective of my project is to analyse the existing portal and come up with the usability issues. We improved the interaction of the portal with thorough user study and best practices. Our challenge involved designing a simple experience to increase the efficiency of house search through ‘Filtering’ options.
The project was split into three parts where initially we did User interviews and conducted ‘Think aloud’ method to come up with useful design insights and problems faced while searching for a house through Grabhouse. Later, in Contextual Inquiry over 2000 lines of insights from 50+ customers were used to create a mass of user stories suiting our various personas. We accompanied the potential house hunters in the city and observed their mental model/methods while searching for a house. The insights were charted and segregated into Insights, Design solution, User suggestions and Breakdowns. Once this was collected, we did Affinity mapping to chunk the insights and group them in a bigger picture.
With the help of insights, the first version of the web portal was redesigned and wireframes were produced. The primary iteration was made over the ‘Filter’ option while searching for a house. Modern design standards were defined and we convinced the business to invest in our new interaction models ensuring that the user workflows were simple, enjoyable and speedy.
Design methodologies:
‘Think Aloud’ method, User interviews, Role playing, Usability goal setting tool, Contextual inquiry, Affinity mapping, Persona creation and Competitor analysis.