BACKGROUND

Furnished Finder is a nationwide platform for travel professionals seeking furnished long-term rentals. It’s specifically targeted to traveling healthcare professionals such as travel nurses, travel physical therapists, and so on. It is similar to Airbnb except it is only long-term rentals without the fees.

As I tackled the redesign of this project, I had resources from real users, (friends who are travel nurses), who inspired me to understand their frustrating experiences with the existing Furnished Finder website.

*This case study is a conceptual project and is not associated with Furnished Finder.

PROBLEM

Traveling professionals, particularly healthcare workers like travel nurses, face significant usability challenges on the existing Furnished Finder website. The lack of intuitive navigation, misleading property listings, and communication gaps with landlords contribute to a frustrating and time-consuming user experience.

SOLUTION

A redesign of the existing website, Furnished Finder, is underway with a focus on intuitive usability, accurate property listings, and streamlined communication with landlords. The goal is to empower traveling professionals, ensuring they feel confident when booking their long-term rentals.

Part 1: Defining the Project Scope

Before talking to any users about their frustrations, I wanted to understand what could be the possible problem space these users were having. I looked at reviews on Yelp, the Apple App Store, and Reddit.

From here, I found themes of frustrations from other existing users, with property owners, misleading listings, and the overall experience of the site feeling like scamming.

Seeing these reviews and from what I heard from friends’ frustrations, helped me create my research goals. I wanted to gain insights into how travelers were using Furnished Finder, observe their journey through the booking process, and identify areas of the website to were unclear.

Part 2: Understanding the users

I talked with a total of 5 new and existing users of Furnished Finder. I did a moderate usability test of the existing platform to see how they moved through the site and had them call out issues they had with the usability and if there was any confusing information.

While organizing all the data, I first used affinity mapping to organize the patterns, but then quickly realized that a user journey map was the best resource. I re-organized the data to understand the specific phases the user was moving through the website, from starting to search a long-term rental to browsing the search options, to viewing the property listings, and lastly booking the actual listing.

4 Key Insights from my Users

#1 - Usability Challenges
The majority of users face usability issues, including map interface problems, confusion about previously viewed properties, and difficulties with the booking request button. Addressing these issues is crucial for improving satisfaction and retention.

#2 - Misleading Listings
All users are frustrated with inaccuracies in property listings, such as photos, amenities, redundant details, and availability information. Ensuring accurate listings is essential for trust and user experience.

#3 - Navigation Frustration
Existing users find it time-consuming to locate properties, and the platform lacks efficient tracking of previous property views, causing frustration.

#4 - Communication Gaps
Existing users encounter challenges in communication with landlords, with slow response times leading to missed opportunities. Bridging this gap is essential for a satisfactory user experience.

Market Research

By doing market research on sites such as Vrbo, AirBnB, Booking.com, and Google Hotels, I saw how these other travel booking websites worked. The main competitor that users mentioned was Airbnb and their main motivation to book on Furnished Finder was there are no additional fees to the site. From my user interviews, some users did mention how important reviews were and the majority of listings on Furnished Finder did not have any reviews, which made the users feel very unease if these places were legit.

Meet Heather!

Heather is our user persona, from our user journey. Because this site is mainly for traveling professionals, I narrowed it down and focused only on travel healthcare workers as that is the targeted audience.

Heather’s main objective is always looking for a safe long-term rental during her travel contracts, but Furnished Finder does not make it easy. It’s a time-consuming process for her to find a place and also very time-consuming booking a place as landlords don’t always respond quickly to the listings.

While there are many opportunities for improvement with Furnished Finder, I decided to mainly focus on the users searching for a property listing as well as the booking process. Consequently, I have chosen to primarily concentrate on enhancing the browsing and search options, as well as improving the property listing viewing experience, as these were the key aspects highlighted by our existing users regarding their site usage experience.

Part 3: Designing a new Experience

By narrowing down the direction, I created a task flow to visualize the number of screens I needed to design and to understand the actions and decisions my users would make in completing their task of searching and booking their long-term rental.

I began by sketching low-fidelity desktop wireframes first, given that the majority of my users mentioned using desktop view for booking long-term rentals. I explored various design patterns by researching existing designs and creating a mood board to reflect what worked.

Subsequently, I decided to experiment with the elements in mid-fidelity designs to better understand and ensure the intuitiveness of my new designs for Furnished Finder. I also sought feedback from colleagues to improve my designs and assist with information architecture. From here, I proceeded to create high-fidelity designs to finalize the entire flow of the Furnished Finder.

Part 4: Testing

I conducted 5 usability tests with existing users of Furnished Finder.