Top Rural

House manager

Final Post Graduate degree project at Kschool in 2018. Now a days I carried on testing and iterating with the new patterns I discover.

My role

In collaboration with my project group we work on UX research, ux strategy, prototyping, UX design, UI design, built the product from zero, version control, scalability with a pattern library.

Nowadays Top Rural is part of Homeaway and it is called Vrbo. Tow years ago Top rural was focused on countryside turism and it brougths the possibility of countryside homeowner to post their house to be booked and to earn an extra money.

Research

In this project I was in charge, with a classmate, to improve the experience of homeowner target. After statistics and studies of countryside tourism, we started building our hypothesis, the «protopersonas» and we launched a survey.

The survey gaves us a relevant data:

- 62% of the homeowners was not their main occupation, they had it as an extra professional activity.
- 74% of the homeowner prefered family guests.
- Most of them lived far away from the holiday houses and a familiar or neighbour took care of the place and welcomed guests.
- Their main concern was to answer travellers their question and to be in touch with them.
- For homeowners would value a mobile app.

Having our target sketched we decided to go deeper and to conduct some interviews. We used a survey canvas to define the interview map.

And we built the homeowner personas

Their completed card, their storyboard and their customer journey, one the registration process and the other the booking management.

In the end we could distinguish three pain points in their booking treatment through the platform, without going into details:

- The registration process was so complicated, because a lot of information to complete at the first time. They also need information in advance to fill the huge form, which they didn’t know, and the form was not visually pleasant.
- They wanted to be in touch with their clients, to explain them what they can do in the surroundings, how they were going t receive the keys or to assist them if they would need help during the stay.
- They had a familiar, a friend, a household assistant or a neighbour that did most of the task: welcoming, traveller registration, cleaning…, and in some cases owners also managed more than one house for booking. In addition the task to organize this become a nightmare and living far away didn’t make it easier.
- The traveller registration had to be sent to the authorities, in which connection play an important rol.

My task was to design a functionality to manage their houses.

Give them the possibility to organize tasks and assistants. Assistant are the dark grey cards and owners are the light grey cards

Wireframes low-fidelity

I started to think how to assign task, how should be the process after a booking was accepted and how the assistant profiles would be.

Wireframes hight-fidelity

We used to test and iterate in the user iteration.

From wireframes to mocks

I iterated twice in the wireframe, because the user test revealed that some elements in the navigation were difficult to understand. For example, the bottom tap icons needs labels with the section name, the way to close panels was short of a gesture indication or users didn’t know how to filter by assistants.
I worked on the visual for completing the project, but I still use it to play and to adjust user mental patterns. Next iteration will come soon…