PropertyGuru Redesign

Redesigning the rental experience

This UX Case Study covers a hypothetical project done in General Assembly’s UXDI course. All information in this case study is provided for illustrative purposes only and does not necessarily reflect the views of PropertyGuru.

Overview

Working in a team of 3, we were to redesign the rental service of PropertyGuru.

PropertyGuru

Founded in 2007, PropertyGuru is the first online property portal in Singapore. It enables property agents to advertise their properties listing online;  Property seekers to search for sales/rental properties online.

By enabling tenants to find their desired rental unit more efficiently will lead to the increase of revenue for PropertyGuru.

The Project Challenges

Undermanned, swamp of deliverables & a tight deadline

For this project, we were supposed to work in groups of 3-4. However, unlike most other groups in our class, we had only 3 people in our group. Despite the manpower shortage, we had to deliver the same amount of deliverables within the short given timeline as other 4-men groups.

The Solution

As the design lead of the team, I knew that a clear project approach and effective project management were essential for the success of the project. Here are some principles that I applied in managing the project.

Effective Project Management

Based on the project requirements, I architected the design approach, identifying the UX activities and the artefacts needed to meet the final deliverables. Each activity was time-boxed and the project progress was monitored very closely.

I applied Scrum’s daily stand-up activity to encourage open communication among the team and for the team to track each other's daily progress in the project.

Leveraging on individual strengths

By identifying our strength and weakness, I was able to leverage on our speciality and effectively distribute tasks among the team to enhance work efficiency and quality.

Divide and Conquer

Time-consuming activities such as user interviews & usability tests were split evenly across the team to minimise work fatigue and maximise efficiency.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork

The team came together for UX activities such as user research synthesis, mapping exercises and ideation.

Close knitted working relation, mutual respect and lots of encouragement and validations were crucial throughout the whole process, which resulted in good quality of work.

The Design Process

User Research

User Research Plan

We kick-started the project by formulating a user research plan to identify the strength and weakness of the rental experience on PropertyGuru and uncover opportunities for improvement in our redesign.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

• Understand what affects tenants’ decision-making process throughout the renting process

• Map the tenants’ rental experience and uncover touchpoints, channels and emotional journey

• Identify existing content and content gap in PropertyGuru’s website & mobile application

• Spot weaknesses and opportunities in the current PropertyGuru’s service design

• Evaluate existing design of PropertyGuru and its competitors so as to uncover their good and bad design patterns.

User Interviews

We interviewed 9 participants with rental experiences in Singapore to find out the end to end rental process and understand their considerations and frustrations in their rental journey.

User Insights

We did affinity mapping with our user interview results and pinpointed 4 main insights.

1. Content

Tenants were unable to find relevant content such as house rules and other occupants’ background information on PropertyGuru. These contents are part of their selection criteria for desired renting units. 

Tenants found it hard to compare their shortlisted listings.

2. Property Agent

Tenants contacted property agents to book house viewing however it was always bottlenecked by the slow turnaround time of the agents.

3. House Viewing

Tenants felt that it was necessary to validate online information by house viewing in their rental process. As most of the time information shown online often differs from the reality.

4. Remote Circumstances

Tenants might not make it for physical house viewing all the time, hence they appreciated alternative options for viewing.

Problem Definition

To further empathise with tenants renting a property in Singapore, 2 user personas were created to represent tenants with varying goals, needs and frustrations. We did customer journey maps to map out the renting journeys to give us a better context on the needs, touchpoints, channels, emotional journey of our personas as well as to identify opportunities that we can potentially tap into.

Identifying the gaps

PropertyGuru, being an advertisement platform, sells contents & services. Hence it was essential for us to identify the existing PropertyGuru’s content and service design gap.

We did a content inventory to catalogue the existing content and use a content map to identify the content gaps that are currently missing.

The content gaps that we identified were summarised below:

• Information such as tenant’s lifestyle preference and house rules are missing.

• Listing information is generic and does not cater for personalisation.

• Availability of house viewing time slots is not provided.

We created a service blueprint using tenants’ actions that were identified from the customer journey map together with various internal touchpoints within PropertyGuru stakeholder to identify the existing service design gaps.

The service design gaps that PropertyGuru has yet to address are house viewing and validation of tenants’ requirements.

Feature Prioritisation

We did a competitive analysis with PropertyGuru’s main competitors such as 99.co and SRX to identify what are the common features as well as to source out for potential features that will be useful for our redesign.

Collectively, we brainstormed possible features and consolidated them from the research findings and came up with a list of new features. 

In consideration of  the tight timeline we had, we made use of the MoSCoW method and did a feature prioritisation.

Considerations for prioritisation

MUST HAVE

• Features addressing problems that more than half of our users raised concern about.

• Features providing PropertyGuru with a competitive edge over their competitors.

SHOULD HAVE

• Features that have lesser business impact as compared to “Must Have”.

COULD HAVE

• Nice-to-have features with little impacts on tenants.

For this phase of the project, we worked on features that fell under “Must Have” and “Should Have”.

Redesign of the existing PropertyGuru

We did a heuristic evaluation on both the existing PropertyGuru’s Website & Mobile app to uncover the usability & UI flaws. On top of that, we conducted a competitive analysis with PropetyGuru’s main competitors, 99.co & SRX to study the pluses and deltas of their design patterns. Some of the key findings are as follow:

• PropertyGuru has not updated its website and mobile design since 2018. Their design is outdated and out of trend.

• PropertyGuru’s mobile application has navigation and discoverability issues.

• PropertyGuru’s website has an inconsistent colour and layout design.

• PropertyGuru has confusing copy-writing and uses excessive textual information resulting in readability issues.

UI Redesign

Based on the findings from heuristic evaluation and competitive analysis, I have redesigned both the PropertyGuru website and mobile app design.

Solution to the problems

With PropertyGuru’s goal and mission in mind, we made sure that our solutions were straight forward and transparent and are able to help tenants make confident decisions through relevant contents, actionable insights and world class services.

1. Tenants find it hard to compare their shortlisted listings

2. Tenants are unable to find contents such as house rules and other occupants’ background information in the listings

With the tenant profile feature, tenants are able to indicate their rental preference. The preference information will be used by the system to recommend listings that fit with the tenants’ preference.

House rules and other occupants’ background information will be included as part of the listings information.

Information that matches tenants’ rental preference will be highlighted for better decision making.

3. Tenants find information stated online does not match reality

Viewing checklist feature is a pre-populated personalised checklist based on listing and profile information for note taking & verification during viewing.

4. Tenants are unable to book viewing as agents are not responsive

House viewing booking feature allows tenants to book house viewing (physical & virtual) online without going through agents who may be too busy to respond. This feature streamlines the house viewing booking process and scheduling for both tenants and agents.

5. Tenants need an alternative to physical house viewing

Live virtual viewing feature is a video conferencing feature. This feature will be beneficial when the physical viewings are not feasible and the property agent will go down to the unit on behalf of tenants to show case the unit remotely.

Improved Service Experience

STORYBOARD (TO-BE)

We visualised our concept and solutions using a storyboard and used it as our usability test scenario.

SERVICE BLUEPRINT

With the new features (highlighted in purple), we are able to bridge the service design gaps.

We introduced…

• House Viewing Booking and Live Virtual Viewing features for House Viewing action.

• Viewing Checklist feature for Validation of Requirement action.

Design System

Having prior experience in design systems and being a UI specialist, I developed the design system for both PropertyGuru’s web & mobile platform. With the design system, I was able to set the stage for my teammates to effectively work on our respective Hi-Fi mockup screens with consistency and efficiency.

Usability Test

We conducted 2 rounds of usability tests with 12 users with rental experience in Singapore to evaluate our solutions and identify usability issues with the prototype. 

The usability test participants took on Tina & Jon’s persona after we gave them the contextual scenario. They were briefed for each task and they interacted with the prototype and attempted to complete the given tasks.

We used the pluses and delta method to synthesis the usability test findings and incorporated the findings into our design improvements.

Design Improvements

Major feedbacks and design improvements are summarised as follows.

Meet the New & Improved PropertyGuru

What’s Next

With every project, there’s always room for improvement. Given more time, we would love to conduct more usability tests to validate our iterated design.

In our next step, we want to look for potential service gaps in PropertyGuru’s buying process and see if our proposed solutions for the rental process can meet the needs of property buyers. We also would like to enhance the online service experience for buyers, agents and landlords.

Reflections

Redesigning an established digital solution that was done by a team of professional UX practitioners is not an easy feat. We have to put in more effort into user research to uncover our users’ pain points and service design gaps as well as identifying existing usability flaws. In terms of UI redesign, we do not have much leeway in terms of freedom of design as we need to stick to the PropertyGuru branding. Hence, we learnt to work with the constraints.

Here’s a big shout out to my awesome teammates Yang Ran and Ng Wai Yan for all the support and hard work throughout the 11 days! I’m glad we managed to pull through together as a team!