I was the primary designer responsible for driving the product vision and designing the holistic user experience. I worked with a team made up of a UX researcher, data analyst, product manager and a full-stack engineer to build out an MVP.

Design

The problem the business uncovered from preliminary market research revealed that when renting a house, what you see is *almost* never what you get. To further validate early assumptions and understand users, we conducted surveys to uncover insights into how people got secondary information about residential rental properties before they made a decision. These surveys were designed and distributed simultaneously in Nairobi, Lagos & London.

We followed this up by interviewing the survey respondents whose needs and frustrations aligned with the business goals & objectives. Collecting all research data, distilling it into meaningful information with affinity maps, presented us with clarity and an opportunity to ask important questions about how we might solve the problem.

The key insight we realized was that there was no way potential renters could find out historical information outside of the property listing information provided by realtors or landlords.

Like Yelp, for renters

After defining what problems to solve, I created low fidelity wireframes to explore possible layout options. For each feature I designed for, I went through multiple rounds of design demos and design critique sessions, dogfooding with the team to ensure that the output aligned with expectations. With prototypes, I conducted remote usability tests with the users we had interviewed and also in-person observations to get feedback that helped to improve / remove any UX issues.

Authenticity

To combat malicious information, I designed and tested multi step verification for each review. Peer review from the community, document-backed verification and geo-location based review. Another high level challenge we dealt with as a team was prioritizing what to solve because very quickly we realized how big the scope of the problem was. We collectively decided on this by balancing very high level business goals with the most important user needs, choosing to focus on realistic wins that had the most impact and required the least amount of effort and resources.