Gamified Experience For A Real Estate Portal [A Hackathon Project]
Last month I participated in my first ever hackathon, organised in my company, with a goal to build novel, high impact idea that helps the company to solve one of the key challenges of knowing the unsaid desires of a home buyer.
Background
We work in the real estate domain and face complex challenges while trying to help people find a place that meets their complex requirements. It might seem as simple as knowing about their preferences for budget, size, location, amenities… but it goes way deeper than that.
Problem
What kind of home would a user buy, highly depends on not just user’s typical home preferences but also the personality of user. Everyone has that dream home concept, per se a big hall for theater system, a bedroom with a small gallery attached, a small kitchen but big dining area and so on and so forth. There is no way to know these dreams and ideas of a buyer through the set of preferences every portal has. Putting up a form or a few more drop downs and check boxes for it, isn’t a viable option at all. This was an extremely challenging problem that interested me a lot and hence I decided to pursue it with my army of three hackers — Bharat, Kartik - a kick-ass full-stack developers and Nayansi - An architect by profession who found her passion in product design.
Idea
Buyer always has his on virtual canvas in his mind where he draws the perfect image of his dream home. While we were interviewing few users earlier, we had seen people talking about their dream home and elaborating every aspect of it. So, the best way was to give them an actual canvas where they can draw it all down.
List Of Features
All of them we brainstormed; For the hackathon night (marked with *) and for future
- 3-D Models of the house for 1, 2, 3 BHK which user can rotate around
Which tells us his preference for house* - Add/destroy — Walls, Dividers, Floor and Furniture*
Key feature that tells us the tiny little details about his ideas for house and spending behavior - Direction*
For user to select his home-facing preference - Credit/Costing System
Putting a cost to every modification and furnishing would make it a more realistic game and help him make a conscious decision - Strong data analytic system
- Run it offline to retain users on the site in case of network failure
Final Product
In the 24 hours of timeline here is what we could build —
A canvas, where user can select the size of his preference, resize each room/compartment with the help of wall and dividers, select a furniture and place it in the room.
They rang the bell just when we were about to put in Direction feature. Just missed.
Conclusion
Although the idea was my brainchild, my hackers deserve more credit for making it happen. Everyone loved the product and gave us the credit for out-of-the-box idea and execution in such a short time.
It was extremely interesting to brainstorm about the crediting/costing system and how to allocate the costs by using the existing data about the user from our portal to make it realistic.
There is still a tremendous scope for improvisation in this product that can fetch us a real good data about the users and help us find them their dream house. However, we’re glad that we built the base for it.
Behind the scenes
Architect Nayansi in action — making layouts that can be automatically rendered
Wired in — Bharat, working on furniture placement.
That’s Kartik telling me how costing logic can be developed. I’m kidding.. We were posing for the photo :D
