moove

Discovering the new renters…

Moove is a student-focussed brand, building something fresh and exciting that needed to appeal to - and reflect the values of - its primary users: Gen Z.

Research soon showed that Gen Z are much less forgiving with older designs and expect new trends to be showcased. They rely on the visual design of a product as a cue towards its quality - if a product is not pretty, they are less likely to adopt it.

But more than just the purely aesthetic, they also expect companies to showcase brand-reflective identities and values. They are quick to see through the inauthentic, and will move on if they don’t believe a businesses values align with their message.

…and their rental problems

“Heating and hot water went out in a freezing week in January and the landlord didn't fix it for six days.”
Save The Student survey, 2020

• Of the top 10 student living issues listed, seven were to do with accommodation standards

• 56% said household issues take longer than a week for landlords to resolve, 15% waited over a month

The pitfalls of rental accommodation are well-known, but for many students this is also likely their first ever experience of living away from home - a somewhat daunting prospect.

A later survey of my own showed students’ top concern when renting was the quality of the property itself, but with 90% of first-time students relying solely on online searches for accommodation, there is no way real way to verify that quality. How might a solution allowing renters to shape a community enabling better house-finding be implemented?

Challenges & Goals

+ Establish a brand from scratch

Design for Gen Z in their language. Short videos, image sequences, vibrant colours - create something easily digestible and shareable.

+ Build trust

Demonstrate the value of a unique and trustworthy peer-to-peer relationship with a growing userbase. How can agents and landlords also been seen as more credible?

IA is everything

Having identified the needs of the users, the first challenge was to how to frame the solution. There are several reasons why a student may visit the site, from searching for reviews about a specific property they have found elsewhere, to simply browsing for inspiration in areas they might like to live, or to leave a review of their own housing.

How might we…

Each reason for a visit has the potential to lead to totally different user flow. Trying to cater to all the possible options would, at best, lead to a very busy looking homepage - but at worst be too noisy and overwhelming to use, leading to a high bounce rate.

The first question asked was, “How might we display all the possible search and review options in a way that is intuitive and engaging?”

1. Combining the primary option paths into a single search function Call To Action allows users an easy point of entry, whatever their initial reason for visiting the site

2. Keeping curated content above the fold reinforces product value, adds credibility and encourages users who just visited the site to browse and engage with the main content

More granular search and filter functions would be shown on the subsequent Results Page, but these were removed from the Homepage search as, in testing, displaying numerous options immediately was a barrier to immediate engagement for several users.

Viewing each property in detail also required a combination of rental listing and community review content. Giving equal priority to the star rating ⭐ (or later, cow-head rating… 🐮) and the property’s headline features allows users to quickly make informed decisions about whether it’s somewhere they’d like to live.

It was also important to think outside the database. Before the product build started, the team had gathered a great deal of quantitive and qualitative data from students about local properties, and their opinions of them. However, mapping this information from the database in a 1 for 1 fashion was not visually appealing. I iterated the property card designs to:

1. Give space to the more significant content. Anyone looking at properties online wants to do just that - look at them. The bigger the images, the better.

2. Save space by removing unnecessary labels, replacing them with easy to scan icons.

3. Present the data in a more appealing way.

Encouraging engagement

Although plenty of property reviews had already been collected pre-product, these only came about via in-person events where opinions could be added to a Google Form in exchange for free food and drink. Encouraging a user to submit their tenancy data voluntarily from their own home would require a persuasive, frictionless way to contribute.

A simple way to do this we found was to start the conversation for them - leaving users starting at a huge, blank text box while they try to think of something to write is a sure-fire way to lose them. A small, fun touch was to experiment with pairing Sentence Starter lozenges with humorous emojis.

These later went on to become another way of filtering properties in their own right, which users loved in testing.

We also allowed for students to upload pictures and videos of a property they had lived in, which could sit alongside the often purely flattering agency photos that the property is listed with.

To maximise user engagement, submission of accommodation reviews required no prior sign-up to the Moove platform, only the entry of their .ac email address to confirm they were a student.

Build and beyond

Within 12 weeks (the backend development began a while before I started…) the product was launched, seeing a staggering 1,316% increase in engagements across all web & socials, and a flurry of students contributing data on their tenancies.

The site was of course designed responsively, as web traffic on mobile has far overtaken desktop now - particularly amongst this projects’ demographic. I created every screen with a consideration as to how it would scale to the smallest currently supported mobile phone viewport (320px across).

The stakeholders were also extremely happy with the end product, and since launch invited me to look into the design of several additional features as the product continues to grow.