Design Process: Community Housing Listing
Our wireframes are to redesign the Community Housing Listing (CHL) website. The CHL sponsored by ASUCD is an interactive listing of living options in the city of Davis, CA. The site is open to both the UC Davis community and the greater Davis community. The website tries to compile all listings into one server to provide students the information they need to settle into a living situation.Our process incorporated interviews, user testing, and iterations.
When first assigned to the project, there were three members. However, midway through we had two. Annie Li and I have been working to encompass as much as possible, while keeping the project consistent and manageable for two people.
Our initial thoughts were based off user interviews in which we identified a generic persona: people want to use the site to find housing options.
Persona 1:
- Goal: Find housing for the upcoming school year
- Motivations: Need a place to stay, there is plenty of information on the website.
- Attitudes: Website is not too difficult to navigate, but there are tweaks that would make it a lot more user friendly.
- Painpoints: No way to list housing from lowest price to highest price (keeping budget in mind). Define vocabulary. No easy comparison.
The persona includes general understanding of navigation of the original site and basic functionality. The users in the interviews were confused with word terminologies and had difficulty comparing the listings. Annie and I focused on addressing these aspects.
Due to the lack of personnel, we were unable to address users wishing to post listings. However, we feel that our work is inclusive of solutions to the problems indicated in the interviews.
The first step of this project was to create a site map. We worked together to identify what the basic flow of the site should be. We concluded on the following:
We then began our wireframe process. We desided to work independently on the wireframes so we could extend our limits and then come back together and settle on one design. We thought this method would give us more freedom and give us more options. My baseline wireframes addressed comparisons:
Annie’s were focused on a larger functionality:
From here picked out the best qualities in both designs and went from there. We used Annie’s lovely layout and my sorting functionality in this final project.
These are the home pages. The drop down menus offer an easy search. Signing in offers more functionality within the site.
The search pages address comparisons and easy search methods.
These last two pages are for functionality within profiles. Being able to message listing owners is a useful tool when trying to find accommodations.
In all, our project tried to cover as much as possible. I am proud of the work we did, although there is always room for improvement. To further our work with this project, I believe more iterations with user testing would be beneficial as well as addressing the posting functionality.
