Client: Rightmove | Role: Senior Product Designer | Year: 2017 | Sector: B2C
Where Can I Live?
Rightmove are the UK’s largest property portal, with 36 million page views a day. Where Can I Live? is a feature that helps users to find affordable areas to buy or rent that match their budget and commuting times.
Early sketches of the interface
Project overview
Originally a hackathon project, the challenge was to make it into a user-friendly product that users can use to search for areas they can afford using budget and places that they need to be close to, to find a property. As a team, we worked together to identify the requirements and limitations that would inform the final solution.
Fully embedded into the scrum team working closely with engineers and a product manager. Worked closely with Daniel Munday, UX designer
Initial research
Creating a distinctive experience
For technical reasons we have to create ‘Where Can I live?’ as a separate product. As a result it was important that we made it distinctive from the core search. One of the ways we felt we could do this was by creating a ‘chat’ function, which would tap into the way users typically speak about their search eg. “ I’m looking for a 2 bed flat, I have a budget of £300K”
We felt that adding in a in a chat function to ‘Where Can I Live?’ Would not only separate it from the core search but also set up the proposition for the user.
Early versions of the chat feature
Creating a ‘chat’
We could not rely on text input as users have a different ways of communicating for example to answer ‘Yes’ to a question you could say ‘yea’, ‘yeah’ or ‘yass’. To address this we would have to put in logic to try and understand the users input and respond in natural language although it was desirable, we didn’t have the time or budget to go down this route. To overcome this challenge we decided to add in fixed inputs that the user will have to select, this allow us to control the answers to a limited set which meant that when the query was sent it matched the queries that are typically sent to the back end. To validate our design we tested and iterated with users.
Feedback from user testing sessions
“I quite like it because, its quite current like WhatsApp I can relate to that.”
— Francis H
“The main thing is the school, the main thing for work is that it’s near to a station. Don’t mind the postcode I use google maps all the time i prefer postcode i think its more accurate”
— Zoe H
