Submeet

Fall 2019

Team

Michelle Chen

Role

User Researcher, UX Designer

Methods

Semi-Structured Interview, Speed Dating, Storyboarding, Affinity Diagramming

Skills

Adobe XD

Every spring, CMU students off-campus are focused on a few things: Carnival, finals and subletting. Countless subletting posts pervade Facebook and Groupme groups. Subletting has always been a persisting endeavor for college students moving out of apartments over the summer. However, homes are tremendoulsy private spaces.

How do you determine if someone is trustworthy enough to stay at your home? How do you know if the subletter will return your security deposit at the end of your stay? We wanted to find out a better way to pair subletters and subleasers by exploring the theme of trust and verification in our application design. But before we started brainstorming, we wanted to understand how CMU students currently find subletters/subleasers.

Who are our Users?

Secondary Research - Competitive Analysis

Some of the most important insights we found included:

Reach

  • Some of the website had great features that helped users find listings, but there weren't many users

    • Trust

  • Some platforms were considered more trustworthy than others, and therefore users were more likely to use them.

    • Payment

  • All platforms except Airbnb did NOT facilitate payment, only communication between subletter and subleaser.

    • Interviews

    We then conducted several 1 on 1 interviews to understand how people currently find subletters or subletters. Beyond user journey, we also asked interviewees about their standards regarding trust. Some of the key insights we uncovered included:

    "The experience overall is stressful. I don't want to pay for my apartment if I'm not going to stay there, but I also don't want someone I don't trust staying in my house."

    If subletters didn't find the right subleaser, they would quit.

    People were more highly likely to sublet from someone they directly knew.

    People were not very likely to sublet to someone 18 and under.

    Subleasers were more focused on physical space and price.

    User Flows

    After our interviews, we got a good glimpse of how subletters and subleasers currently find housing. The two most common methods were word of mouth and digital processes. Looking at the user flows, we noticed that the main drop-out point for both the subleaser and subletter was communication and interviewing.

    This helped reveal a user need that fueled our design decision: Trust

    digital user flow for subletter digital user flow for subleaser word of mouth user flow for subletter word of mouth user flow for subleaser

    Mind Mapping

    Organizing the information we received from our interviews, we created a mindmap. First brainstorming all relevant topics on post-it notes. We then grouped these notes into specific categories: starting narrow and then expanding to broad thematic categories like "Verification." This brought to light two main categories of verification: physical verification and social verification.


    Mind Map of Subletter Space
    Our mind mapping session validated trust as a primary user need.

    UI Process

    color and font guide for UI design

    Playing around with colors until we found the perfect match. We chose to incorporate sans serif fonts for a sleeker, more readable look.

    Lo-Fi Prototypes

    We quickly sketched screens - detailling the subletter path and the subleaser path. The purple posted notes on the screens include written feedback and changes we received from user testing.

    low fidelity paper screens with annotated notes

    User Testing

    user insights and accompanying design change

    After creating the low fidelity screens, we asked a few users to test the usability of our application through a task-based think aloud protocol. Through user testing, we learned a few insights that helped us when creating high fidelity mockups.

    High Fidelity Prototype

    Applying the feedback we got from users, we created an onboarding process and two different modes: one for subletters and one for subleasers.