Simplifying Property Search for OYOLife Customers

UX Case Study

What is OYOLife?

OYO Life is a co-living space that allows people from various cities to come together and share a space and interest. Here people live as a part of a community and share a beautifully designed fully furnished space. It aims at providing all the required amenities of comfort and hassle-free living.

What does OYO life is trying to solve?

People go through a lot of struggle while finding a house on rent and the situation gets worst for bachelors and unmarried couples. Additionally, even if one gets a suitable place to stay the landlord imposes a lot of restrictions and rules.

Brief

80% of potential customers land on the listing page of the OYOlife mobile site with SEO. Therefore, we need to design the experience for the listing page so that we can increase the retention rate and reduce the bounce rate on the page.

Goal

• Improve search the desired property
• Improve no. of leads generated

Design Process

I was a solo designer and followed the end-to-end design process to come up with an impactful solution.

1. User research
2. Ideation — Wireframing and Designs
3. A/B testing of potential solutions
4. Iterations

Stakeholder Collaboration

For the completion of this project, I have worked closely with

1. Product Manager: To understand the business needs and analytical data.
2. Technical team: To understand the system constraints and efforts required to build.

Old Product Listing page

Problems with the old design

It becomes challenging for the user to look for the right property with the lack of information and clear action buttons.

• Users were not using search and filter options.
• Information regarding gender for not clear on the property cards.
• The property name helps users to decide on a property.
• The locality of the property was not clear and low in readability.
• Clear action to view the property is not there.

A key finding from interviewing 5 users

Interviewed 5 users who have relocated from different cities for work or studies. All of them had done their research online to find a desired property to stay. 3 out of 5 were staying in Oyolife property.

🗺 Finds places near his college or office

🚖 Check the availability of public transportation from that locality

🛒 Availability of nearby grocery shops, chemists and parks

💵 Current rental trend in that locality

New Product Listing Page

Breaking the primary goal to improve the search of the property and getting leads to measurable goals.

• Increase no. of clicks on search and filters
• Increase no. of scheduled visits
• Increase time spent on the product listing page
• Improve Net promoter score
• Portray the brand image for loyalty, trust, quality and freedom.

Redesigning the experience

Search Bar

Solution: The hint text in the search bar changed to “Where is your office or college” from Location/landmark.

Why I did do that: After user interviews, I realised that users are not much aware of the nearby areas or popular localities, but they wish to stay near their workspace or college to avoid travelling time. Hence, asking about the location of their office and college and filter properties according to distance has worked well.

Result: 8 out of 10 users started using search to find their desired property.

Property Card

Solution: Clear information about the gender, occupancy, main amenities on the card, price and location on the property card. The clear action button “view home” doesn’t confuse them and leads them further.

Why I did do that: According to user research, I understood that information like gender, occupancy, amenities, price and location is the primary decision-making factor for the user to click on the card. Additionally, the action buttons on the card were Book free visit and pay to book is helping them enough to get more information about the property.

Result: The newer design has improved the no. of page views on the property detail page by 25% and increased the leads by 5%.

Filters

Solution: Bring the option to select more popular filters i.e. price, gender and occupancy on the listing page itself.

Why I did do that: With data analytics tools we found out the most frequently used filters to find a property was occupancy and gender

Result: This has reduced the no. of page views on the filter screen as users were getting the most frequent on the listing page itself which has ultimately increased the use of filters like price, gender, and occupancy.

Learnings

Though the newer design helped us in many ways there were certain falls also.

• There was a marginal difference(decrease of 3%) in no. of users scheduling visits from the product listing page.
• There was a decrease in the use of other filters as the most frequently used filters were become accessible from the product listing page itself.

Iteration — A/B testing

We A/B tested two versions first with one action button “View More” and the other with two action buttons “Schedule a visit” and View more. We have decided to roll it out to 25% of total users first.

Results

There were still less no. of clicks on the schedule a visit. This experiment has made clear that users are inclined towards checking the property information rather than scheduling the visits from the listing page.

We have decided to go with variant A as it fastens the decision-making as the no. of leads is not impacted. Later we changed the copy of the button from “View More” to “Check Room” for providing a clear cue about what the user will see next.

Conclusion

This was my first step towards improving the experience for OYOLife and the results were quite motivating. This project was not only about improving the discoverability of the properties on the listing page but it proposes the concept of renting a property online. It is designed to see the information as the user needs it at the same time the clean layout makes it more readable on the go.