AptAid

The competitive analysis really helped me in understanding how my problem was a serious one and how the current solutions didn’t address it completely.

I also visited a housing fair organized by an Offcampus housing which was a great experience to know about the information provided on their websites and made me realize that the information provided online was very ambiguous and a mode of advertisement just focussing on the best features that the apartment provided. Through this stage, I also realized that there was no way through which a student could seek help from a non-property manager for the apartment search. This process was helpful to come up with 2 potential solutions of connecting with students living at an apartment or providing a detailed review system to improve the apartment search. This stage really helped me to dig deeper into the problem I had posed and broaden my scope of features and functionality required to solve the problem.

From user research , it was found that students generally seek advice from students from their same country or school living in Ann Arbor or read online reviews before booking an apartment. But all these sources are not reliable making students choose a wrong apartment. I also designed a survey to reach more users. Some of the questions in the survey along with the reports are as follows:

After understanding the problem in depth I started brainstorming ideas in search of possible solutions. I started sketching possible approaches and came up with 8 different solutions. The visual form of sketching really made me understand each solution in better depth and was really helpful in understanding the downfalls in some of the solutions.

Sketching was a good technique to visualize the solution but storyboarding was important to understand how a user would use this particular solution in a specific scenario. This was really helpful in narrowing down some of the important solutions and coming up with the best solution
Understanding the user flow through Storyboarding made me realize that the initial solution of making a second-year student find an apartment physically for the new student that I had come up through sketching was irrelevant.

I met users once again and this time showed them my storyboards to know about their opinion on my solutions. Along with that in-class Brainstorming acitivity and QOC diagrams were really helpful to finalize my solutions.

I created personas and anti-personas which were a great reference for checking if my solution was actually addressing the users' needs and I wasn’t going off track.

Low fidelity prototype was the best technique to get user feedback. It gave the feel of the final app and as it was a low fidelity one, it was really easy to make changes.

After creating the paper prototype I tested my prototype with the users and got valuable feedbacks that lead me to create the best version of the digital prototype solving the problem in all possible ways.

I created the prototype using Adobe XD as I wanted to try out a software which was comparatively new. Usability testing led me to start my application with apartment search rather than just providing information of similar students the way I had designed in my Paper prototype.
The entire design process was very helpful to design the best version of my application.

It was a great experience working on a problem which was dear to me. The users were really happy with the digital prototype that I presented to them. As I desgined the digital prototype using Adobe XD it had some limitations in comparioson to Sketch. But I had a great time designing ach and every minute icon giving the design of the application an original touch.