Coyote Rental Solutions
Building Trust between Landlords and Tenants
Overview
Client: Wyatt Cooper Brown, Coyote Rental Solutions
Brief: Design an iOS app
Timeline: 3 weeks
The Team
UX designers: Dee, Itzel and myself
UI designers: Gurvi and Cheryl
The Opportunity
The client experienced first hand the difficulties of the renting process. As a potential tenant, he found it extremely difficult to convince his future landlord to trust him.
It seems that everyone has either experienced or knows someone that has experienced a negative renting / housing situation. My wife and I have personally experienced the pitfalls of renting a property. Excited to move into and spend the night in our first property together. We were unfortunate victims of a severe bedbug infestation that had gone unchecked. That night was the first and only experience of us renting a property!
In fact every member of the team had a ‘nightmare’ renting story which helped us empathise with the user.
The client’s company motto is:
“Eliminating problems that plague the renting industry.”
Also, some key words the client used to describe the brand were;
“Accessible, Inspirational, Enlightening and Trustworthy.“
We often referred back to the above words for guidance in terms of overarching business ideals.
The Solution
As soon as the initial kick off meeting was over, we produced an affinity diagram which helped us to understand the concept of the app, and to narrow down our scope, at this point we also came to understand that there would be two distinct users — Landlords and tenants.
Business Goals
The initial kick off meeting was very positive, and we were all excited by Wyatt’s enthusiasm. It also clarified for us what the main business goals were:
- Tenants to be able to find a place to live without the hassle.
- Landlords to be able to find a reliable tenant that doesn’t cause problems.
- A platform where both the landlord and tenant can bring their previous reputation with them
- A place that is accessible and everyone feels welcome
Features that Wyatt requested were:
- A rating system for the landlord and the tenant
- Messaging between landlord and tenant
- Mapping properties
- Profile development
- Photo uploading
- Video uploading
- Online transactions
- Data protection
- SmartWatch/iWatch linking capabilities
- VR support
- Video calling
Research
Surveys
We were stunned by the amount of responses we received from the survey; over 180 surveys completed within 24 hours. We believe this is due to people empathising with the subject of renting.
For the tenants we asked questions such as:
How did you find the property you are renting at the moment?
How do you feel about your relationship with your landlord?
How long have you been renting the property you are living in?
For the landlords, we asked questions such as:
How did you find tenants that are renting your property?
How do you decide on whether to rent to a potential tenant?
What have your experiences been like with tenants in the past?
Our gut feeling was that we would get a lot of negative responses regarding peoples experiences of renting from both the landlords and the tenants, but in actual fact, the data we received was very balanced, with an equal amount of good and bad experiences. We put this down to people wanting to share more openly when they had negative renting experiences.
We found out that:
- The main factors for tenants when deciding on which property to rent were: price 92%, Location 90%, Size 64%, Appearance 51% and neighbourhood safety 35%.
- The main positive traits that tenants like about their landlords are that they were honest, friendly, responsive, trustworthy.
- The traits that tenants least liked about their landlords were that they were Greedy, Lazy, slow to respond and had a lack of empathy
- Tenants most feared being thrown out of their property, the landlord raising their rent, not having problems resolved quickly enough.
- 100% of people shared their properties with others.
- Landlords had the best ROI when using Facebook, Kijiji and Craigslist
- The demographic of tenants was split evenly between young professionals and families
- Most landlords rated the process of finding a new tenant very easy as illustrated in the chart above.
- Landlords decided on tenants by using a combination of interviews, references and gut instinct.
- The main documents that landlords wanted to see from potential tenants were a previous landlords reference 81%, proof of work 62% and bank statements 23%
- The main fears that landlords had when renting out their property were; tenants refusing to leave 60%, bad tenants slipping through the net 56%, a tenant that disrupts the neighbours 50%, tenants violating rules 44% and illegal use of home 35%.
As mentioned before, despite the fears of the landlords, only 10% had bad experiences with tenants, and an overwhelming 78% had good experiences with previous tenants.
Interviews
We interviewed a total of five tenants and five landlords. It seemed as though everyone we talked to was very passionate about the subject of renting, or wanted to share a story.
We asked questions such as:
- What are the demographic of your tenants?
- What fears to you have when renting?
- What opinions do you have of you landlord?
- How have your experiences been?
Planning
Feature Prioritisation
At this point we were feeling very overwhelmed, but it really helped us to prioritise the many features that we wanted to implement from the clients business goals, and the features we felt we needed after our user research.
Competitor Comparative Analysis
The main websites or apps that we looked at were — Craigslist, Kijiji, padmapper and roomster. We looked at these platforms as they were the most popular ways that tenants and landlords connected apart from facebook.
User Personas
User Flows
A real breakthrough came for us when we started to brainstorm the user flow on a whiteboard. We focused on the tenant user flow as it was the longest and most complicated flow. The white boarding exercise was a great way of making sense of the intricacies of the app. It also helped to see how what interactions we would need to implement when the tenant and the landlord connected.
Design Studio
We used a process known as design studio to efficiently and quickly paper prototype the main screens of the Coyote app:
Testing
After testing our paper prototype, we changed the copy of certain labels so that it made more sense, we also added additional screens that were pointed out during our presentation to the app dev students. We also took there advice and automated certain functions e.g. an autosave function for uploading or amending documents.
Iterations
Prototypes
Click on the images below to see either the tenant or the landlord prototypes:
Benefits to the User
Future Considerations
