BACKGROUND

Furnished Finder connects travel nurses with long-term furnished rentals, offering a fee-free alternative to platforms like Airbnb. During the pandemic, a 35% increase in demand for travel nurses led to a dramatic rise in listings, from 50,000 in 2020 to over 250,000 today. While this growth is a testament to the platform's success, it has created challenges for users, making it harder for them to efficiently find suitable housing.

Note: This is an independent project and not affiliated with Furnished Finder.

PROBLEM

As the platform’s listings grew, travel nurses found it increasingly difficult to efficiently locate suitable housing. The overwhelming number of choices, paired with inefficient search and navigation features, created a stressful, time-consuming experience that put users at risk of abandoning their search. This friction threatened user satisfaction and retention, with the potential of losing users to competitors offering more intuitive booking solutions.

SOLUTION

After conducting interviews with travel nurses and learning about their frustrations, I redesigned the booking flow with a focus on clarity and simplicity. I prioritized organizing information by creating a clearer hierarchy, allowing users to easily compare properties and make quicker decisions. The new design streamlined the search and booking process, addressing key pain points and ultimately enhancing users satsitification by 100% during user testing.

User Research

What exactly are travel nurses experiencing?

During moderated usability tests, I heard first-hand how users felt about the site’s disorganization:

“I'm just trying to find the best deal—great location, amenities, and value—but the whole thing feels so disorganized and time-consuming.”

- Alex, travel nurse

These pain points highlighted the urgent need for a more intuitive and trustworthy experience, particularly around the consistency of the design and the clarity of information

Defining their Pain Points

Navigation Overload Hinders Decision-Making and Bookings

Ideating and Designing for our users

creating new opportunities

In response to the frustrations faced by travel nurses, I began brainstorming solutions within the framework of my user journey map (listed above), identifying new opportunities. My focus initially turned to the two crucial screens: the search results page and the property listings page. During my initial usability tests with users, I observed these pages were critical in their decision-making process when booking a property.

From sketches to mid-fidelity, I conducted market research on competitor sites such as Vrbo, Airbnb, Google Hotels, and Booking.com. I studied their booking flows, search results, and property listings pages for inspiration, focusing on existing design patterns and information architecture.

This information was helpful in re-designing some of the pages for Furnished Finder. I identified the importance of emphasizing information and visual hierarchy to enhance the property listings page. For the search results page for Furnished Finder, I recognized the necessity of adding a robust filters page to help users organize listings based on proximity to hospitals and grocery stores.

I added additional screens to create a complete flow for my usability testing with users. The flow starts from the home page, moves to searching for a property listing, then viewing a property listing and finally booking or contacting the property owner. I utilized task flows to ensure the sequences were intuitive and frictionless for users.

Designing for Information Architecture and Visual Hierarchy

A deeper look dive into the property listings page

I spent a good amount of my time designing the property listings page. Some challenges that I faced with this page was understanding what specific information users wanted to know and also asking myself, how could I get the user to feel confident into booking this rental property. I recalled from user interviews

Main Issues Faced by Users with the Original Page:

• Travel nurses had to scroll to the bottom of the page to read the description.

• Users had difficulty viewing photos due to the automatic slideshow format.

• Users were unclear about the property's distance and neighborhood safety.

• Users spent too much time deciding if they were interested in the property.

Addressing These Problems:

• I realized I needed to rearrange the information on the page. I reviewed the initial usability testing sessions to observe user behavior and took notes to prioritize the most important elements, such as placing the property description higher on the page.

• For photos, I switched to a bento grid layout, allowing users to quickly view all photos at once, and added a CTA to view all photos.

• I added new information to the page, including the property's exact location, details about the surrounding area, and information about the property owner, enabling users to understand who they are renting from. Additionally, I included a reviews section, hoping to encourage users to book properties rather than continue searching for another one.

UI kit & Branding

Additional details for consistency

Before testing with my users, while in mid-fidelities, I decided to create a UI kit, that I was able to refer back to colors, typography, components, and icons for consistency throughout my designs.

As well as I re-created the Furnished Finder logo to keep it simple with the main color so users can focus on the site itself. As well as making a responsive logo.

Usability Testing with the new designs

Gaining feedback from my users

After finalizing my mid-fidelity designs and creating my UI kit that includes colors, typography, and a responsive logo, I could apply all these details to the high-fidelity wireframes. By going back to my task flows, I double-checked to insure I was prototyping all the possible ways my user could complete the task, which was finding a property listing.

Final Designs of Furnished Finder