Role: User Experience Design, Product Thinking, Market Research

Tools: Figma, Pen and Paper

Timeline: 2 weeks

Introduction

My Experience with Renting

Last year, college students around the US were forced to make a difficult decision about their fall semester: do we return to campus? Rice University places a huge emphasis on residential culture. But after considering a high risk of contracting COVID and even higher on-campus housing fees, I scrapped my plan to live on campus and scoured the internet for a place to rent. Here, I got a taste for how difficult the leasing experience is.

As a product designer, I was interested in the way Zumper tackles this problem.

The Rental Industry

To fully understand where Zumper is positioned in the rental industry, I wanted to see how its competitors were faring.

Here’s some info:

• Zillow is the industry leader, boasting over 110 million properties. You might’ve used the Zestimate feature once or twice.
• Apartments.com is a popular rental platform. Renters can browse, apply, sign leases, and pay rent. Landlords can post listings.
• Trulia personalizes listing alerts to the renter, and it’s got a pretty hefty map.
• Rent.com has a cool moving quote feature.

The Basics of Zumper

The CEO of Zumper, Anth Georgiades, said that Zumper wants to become the “Airbnb for one-year leasing.” In other words, Zumper strives to make the rental process as easy as booking a hotel. This is where Zumper starts to differentiate itself from its competitors. It acts as a bridge between the landlord and the renter, streamlining the end-to-end rental process onto one platform. Renters can browse listings, pay monthly rent, and do everything in between all in one app. Landlords can post and manage listings and collect rent. I decided to focus on improving Zumper’s renter experience because the rental persona makes up the larger proportion of Zumper’s users and due to my personal struggles with rental interfaces.

One of Zumper’s biggest selling points to renters is its Instant Apply feature. Usually, renters fill out a separate application for every place they apply to. Instant Apply removes these redundancies by allowing renters to apply to a bunch of listings with a single application.

Zumper targets price-sensitive renters, so it’s no surprise that the user demographic is mostly comprised of mobile-facing millennials (23 to 38 years old). But millennials aren’t the only group that is strapped for cash and constantly on the go.

Due to the pandemic, most in-person classes have been shut down, and there are strict limitations to social gatherings. My university really values residential culture, but only 40% of students lived on campus this year, compared to the usual 75%. Students aren’t seeing the appeal of paying ridiculous amounts of money for mediocre housing and dining and a muted college culture.

I predict that we will see an increase in the number of college students that transition towards renting. For this reason, I focused my user research on this demographic.

(Target) User Research

Rental Journey

Although I had gone through most of the rental process myself, I wanted to make sure that I had a good grasp of the typical rental journey. I interviewed 15 college students.

I’d like to note that all of my interviewees used a wide range of rental platforms, and most of them did not use Zumper. However, those who did use Zumper mentioned that Instant Apply was a big reason why. This diagram reflects the general rental process — not specific to a singular rental platform:

Something was obviously wrong with the comparison stage. After probing a little deeper, I was able to find three main pain points that student renters face.

Renter Pain Points

Pain Point 1: When renters are looking back at listings they are considering, they can’t easily recall the pros and cons of each option. Renters are browsing through hundreds of posts and having to remember what they liked/disliked about a home drastically slows down the rental process.

Pain Point 2: There is no easy way to compare listings. No platforms support a visually intuitive way to closely compare listings, so renters find themselves tirelessly navigating into and out of each of these listing posts.

Pain Point 3: There is not enough info about the location of the listing on the app/website. In America, 62% of renters value the rental location over the listing itself. My interviewees valued price, location, and unit quality the most. But people are becoming more willing to sacrifice price for a better location or higher quality apartment. Rental platforms don’t offer enough information about the location of the listing, leaving the renter wondering: How safe are the surroundings? Where is the nearest grocery store? Where are my close friends’ apartments located?

Current Renter Workarounds

Renters turn to other platforms to solve these problems. To find out about the surroundings of listings, renters look to websites like Neighborhood Scout for crime rates and Google Maps to see what’s nearby. As for comparing listings, people take to platforms like Google Sheets to list out the pros, cons, and details. I can attest to using this method, and let me tell you, this is not a fun process.

How is Zumper Addressing these Pain Points?

I decided it was time to explore the Zumper iOS mobile app to see if they already had solutions for these renter pain points.

Zumper doesn’t solve any of the renter pain points. Though renters can favorite listings, there is no way to visually compare them or to help users recall why they liked or disliked it. In addition, the map feature offers very limited information about the surrounding location.

Why is this a Business Problem?

As someone who’s interested in how design plays into a business model, I was curious to find out about how Zumper makes money. Zumper does this in two ways:

1. Landlords pay to get their listings pushed towards the top of the search results.
2. Zumper takes a fee off of each lease it closes.

Since Zumper does not solve the aforementioned pain points, renters would use the same workarounds, which take them away from Zumper’s platform and onto other sites. This increases the likelihood that the renter will encounter listings from Zumper’s competitors and prevents Zumper from making money from closing an additional transaction. For example, Neighborhood Scout’s map feature has the option to show Homes.com’s places for sale and rent. Remember Zumper’s competitive edge: Instant Apply? Users are leaving Zumper’s platform before they get to experience the feature that sets it apart.

Problem:

Users have trouble comparing listings on Zumper, so they leave the app before experiencing Instant Apply. This complicates the rental process and reduces Zumper’s renter market share.

Goal:

Simplify the rental process leading up to Instant Apply.

Design Process

Pain Point 1: Why do you like/dislike this listing?

At the time that a user favorites a listing, they have a pretty clear idea of its pros and cons. This would be the ideal time to prompt the user to indicate what they liked or disliked about it. I considered the idea of asking the user to type up a little blurb about their thoughts for the listing. But since the rental process already places a lot of cognitive strain on the renter, I opted for an option that required less effort from the user: a dialogue box with a list of tags.

These tags would show up in individual listing pages like this on Zumper’s existing designs:

Pain Point 2: Comparing listings

Since renters favorite listings that they are heavily considering applying to, I decided to include a comparison tool within the Favorites tab.

a. Selecting listings to compare

I fixed the “Compare listings” button so that it would be visible as the user scrolled through all of their favorites. After tapping this button, users can select the checkmarks on top of the listings they want to compare, and they’ll be taken to a page that displays the info needed to make a comparison. I slightly redesigned the Favorites tab by placing listings into separate cards so that when the user taps the “Compare listings” button, the cards pop up, giving off the affordance that it’s tappable.

b. Compare Page Header

For me, this next page was the most challenging to design. Few mobile apps support a comparison feature because of the limited mobile screen size. But I knew that this idea was worth exploring and would vastly improve the user experience while supporting its business model.

I was torn between how many listings to compare, so I decided to take a step back and think about how comparisons are made. I realized that comparisons are always made in pairs. Even if you have three listings: A, B, and C, you are quickly comparing A+B, A+C, and then B+C. With this revelation, I focused on allowing users to easily switch between two listings to compare. This sticky drop-down header allows this to happen:

This drop-down splits the screen into two columns, doubly acting as a header and a means to switch the listings that the renter is comparing. To make another comparison, the user can uncheck listings that are currently being compared and check another pair of their favorite listings.

c. Main Comparison Page

Next, I had to decide how to display all of the information. For their individual listings, Zumper puts everything on one page, but this makes the user scroll a lot. Especially since I was working with double the information, I wanted to break it down into digestible chunks, so I created three different sub-pages: Overview, Amenities, and Location.

On the Overview tab, the user can find all of the things that renters first look for: pictures, price, and size. The pros and cons tags are also included here. I noticed that Zumper only includes the surrounding area’s Walk Score, so I added the Bike and Transit Scores to show other transportation options.

After scanning through the overview of the listings, the user can move to the second tab, Amenities. Below are some iterations of the general format of this tab.

I ultimately decided to go with the last iteration because it is easily scannable and gives equal real estate to both columns:

Pain Point 3: A Robust Map Feature

The third and final tab is the Location. Zumper’s current map contains information about bus stops, rail stops, and schools nearby.

Most of my interviewees said they looked for the closest grocery stores and metro stops, and their proximity to school, work, or friends and family. I added a “Grocery” category, and I consolidated bus stops and rail stops under “Public Transport.” For distinctive use cases, I added a search feature. I also included a “COVID Testing” category so that users can see if they would have access to testing centers nearby. Renters also mentioned that they look up the crime rates in a neighborhood, so I included a crime map. To give the user a summary of the information contained under the other categories, I created the “Overview” category.

I don’t have access to Zumper’s internal research, but I found it surprising that Zumper did not include easy access to these popular nearby places. Since Zumper already uses Google Maps’ API, I am assuming it wouldn’t be too difficult to add these categories.

I will be showing map designs in the context of the comparison tool, but the designs for a single listing would look similar — just with one listing displayed.

Once on the map page, “Overview” is the first chip that the user will land on.

Zumper’s bottom sheet is fixed to the lower half of the screen. With Material Design’s best practices in mind, I redesigned the bottom sheet to be expandable and collapsable. Dragging the bottom sheet up shows a summary of what’s included in the other pills. Here, the user can hit “See More” to be taken to the information under another category.

The information under “COVID Testing,” “Grocery,” “Schools,” and “Public Transport” chips would be displayed in the same format because they all show nearby locations. I focused on fleshing out the designs for the “COVID testing” chip.

The closest location is automatically routed on the map. In the bottom sheet, the selected locations are highlighted in blue, but users can reroute to other locations.

Zumper uses Google Maps, so I recognize that if Google’s public API does not support multiple starting points and destinations, this solution may be unfeasible from a developer standpoint. To compromise for this, the user can select a single location to route to at one time.

Finally, I designed a crime rate map, drawing inspiration from Neighborhood Scout’s website.

Here, a higher opacity corresponds with a higher crime rate. Users can tap on a neighborhood to view the number of reported crimes in that area.

If I had more time, I would have researched the ethical implications behind the crime rate map. Only providing users information about the number of crimes reported can be very misleading. I would explore different ways to present the breakdown of these reported crimes into more specific categories (theft, assault, murder, etc.). However, it’s crucial to consider the general ethical implications behind this feature. If people are reluctant to move into neighborhoods with higher crime rates, these neighborhoods may not get the chance to become safer. On the flip side, neighborhoods with fewer crimes would become saturated, leading to an increase in rental prices.

I would also look into the ethical implications behind the color choice for this map. I experimented with several of Zumper’s brand colors:

Red seemed too emotionally charged, whereas orange and pink felt inappropriate for the data it was representing — not serious enough. I settled on gray, as it seemed like the most neutral choice. But I’d like to do A/B testing to check these assumptions that I made.

User Testing

To assess the basic usability of my redesign, I conducted user testing on 5 participants. This was a super quick user test, but I was still able to take some insights and make slight adjustments to my designs. Here are some key takeaways:

• Some users did not see the “Compare listings” button on the Favorite’s Tab at first glance. It’s very important that the comparison function should stand out, so I placed a white background behind the button.

• It’s hard to see the vertical line dividing the Comparison pages down the middle. I increased the stoke width and used a darker shade of gray for the vertical line.
• In addition to the size of apartments, users want to see how the floorplans of the apartments compare with each other. I didn’t have time to experiment with floorplan comparisons, but this is something I’m excited to explore in the future!

My Final Designs

Final Thoughts

If you got down here, thanks so much for sticking with me! I had a great time working on this challenge, and I’m very happy with how much I was able to accomplish within this 2-week sprint. However, there are definitely areas that I wish I could have gotten to.

• As I mentioned previously, I would research the ethical implications of the crime rate map.
• I would also explore how to display floorplan comparisons rather than just square footage comparisons.

Things that I learned…

• Don’t force your problem into a design process. Each problem is unique and needs to be tackled in a different way. There isn’t a “correct” solution to a problem, and that’s what makes design so challenging and exciting! Typically, I’ve seen people evaluate the in-app user journey to identify problems. But I took a different approach by looking at the rental journey and then at how Zumper alleviates or eliminates the rental journey pain points.
• Don't shy away from difficult problems. After all, the solutions to the difficult problems that yield the most rewarding results. I struggled to make designs conducive to the mobile screen size, but once I thought about how humans make decisions, I was able to come up with a solution that I was happy with.
• Research, research, research. While I did not have access to Zumper’s internal research or strategy, I was able to gain a lot of insight through their blog and other articles. Every design decision should be backed with the reasoning that can only come from research.

Thank you, again, for reading my case study. I would love to hear any feedback. Feel free to comment and reach out to me!