Tyler Fearns - ForRent.com Live

ForRent.com Live App

While doing some user research for ForRent.com we unearthed a problem that was affecting renters and apartment communities. Giving a walkthrough of an apartment was time consuming and sometimes not possible. Renters that were in the area would have to work within the community’s busy schedule and find a time to drive to the property and view it. Out of town renters had it even worse. They had to force multiple apartment walkthroughs into a one day visit to the city they were moving to. Some out of town renters couldn’t make this one day visit and had to rent without a walkthrough, many times leading to an unpleasant renting experience.

To solve this issue we came up with a solution that let renters get a face to face walkthrough without leaving their home and allowed apartment managers to schedule numerous apartment walkthroughs at the same time. We created a tool that allowed property managers to create a schedule for live apartment walkthroughs. Once that scheduled time came up the property manager could show a live feed of the apartment right from their mobile device. Interested renters could join in the live feed and get answers to their questions directly from the property manager in real time.

         The Process 
      

 User Research After doing a series of user research with renters and property managers we found that apartment walkthroughs was a stressful experience for both parties.
 Market Research After understanding the problem we researched how we could solve this issue using our ForRent.com listing services. 
 Planning Once we understood what solution we wanted to pursue we created a plan stating the project's goals, markers for success, planning a MVP and preparing a growth strategy.

 Sketch & Prototype With a plan organized I put pen to paper and sketched some prototypes. I used these paper prototypes to get stakeholders on-board with the direction we wanted to move.
 Design Using my hand drawn prototype I quickly moved to the computer and created high fidelity mocks. I used those mocks to compose a digital prototype to test the designs.
 User Testing Soon after the prototype was completed we tested the designs with renters and property managers to see how they interacted with the product.

Soon after the prototype was completed we tested the designs with renters and property managers to see how they interacted with the product. During the conception of this idea live streaming was just picking up steam on popular social media platforms like facebook and youtube. However, live interaction was not inherently clear to users yet. With this in mind we had to make the experience incredibly simple so any user could easily understand it. We opted to not give users direction during user testing to make sure they could navigate the app without help or any expectations. During the testing users moved fluidly through the apps and showed overwhelming enthusiasm towards the app. After collecting the results and pitching it to stakeholders the project was moved into a development cycle.