Tenants on Qasa can publish a tenant ad about themselves where they let landlords know who they are and what type of home they are looking for. Landlords can browse and find tenants among these ads. Even though the feature is used by over 50% of Qasas users and over 10 000 Swedish users have a published tenant ad at any time, the feature hasn’t been iterated upon beyond the first MVP.
Qasa also did a full rebranding with design agency Bold in 2023. They have since worked on making their product express their new brand values which call for a huggable, comforting, friendly and intuitive experience.
Qasa wanted me to focus on three main problems with the tenant ads.
In the current profile ad creation, Qasa only asks tenants for basic structured data about who they are and what they are looking for. A lot of important information and nuances are not captured in this data. A lot of responsibility is thus put on tenants who need to be savvy enough to know what landlords want to know about them, and be able to express it well in a free form text-field. This makes it needlessly hard for tenants who are not as good at writing introductions to find a home, making the rental market unjust.
My objective was to compile what structured data we should ask tenants to minimize the need for tenants to write free text.Qasa wanted me to focus on three main problems with the tenant ads.
In the current profile ad creation, Qasa only asks tenants for basic structured data about who they are and what they are looking for. A lot of important information and nuances are not captured in this data. A lot of responsibility is thus put on tenants who need to be savvy enough to know what landlords want to know about them, and be able to express it well in a free form text-field. This makes it needlessly hard for tenants who are not as good at writing introductions to find a home, making the rental market unjust.
My objective was to compile what structured data we should ask tenants to minimize the need for tenants to write free text.
The current tenant ads present basic data about tenants in a pretty neutral way. The tenant ads feel more like a table of contents than a presentation of human.
My objective was to present tenants in a way that creates trust and makes a tenant appealing to a landlord.
The UI of the tenant profile ads look bare, visually unappealing and don’t align with Qasas new visual brand guidelines.
My objective was to deliver visually appealing high-fidelity UI designs that align with Qasas new brand.
I started the project by analyzing Qasas tenant ad and related functionality, and laying it all out with screenshots to understand the current solution.
I also did benchmarking by trying out other services that in some way concern themselves with gathering information about users in order to then present them to other users. Among the services analyzed were not only other rental services, but also dating apps and job seeking platforms.
I needed to learn what data we should help tenants communicate in their tenant ads. I used tree methods to find out what data we could add to tenant ads.
I gathered all my findings in digital post-its and then ordered them using an Affinity Diagram.
Qasa wanted to explore a less technical way of presenting tenants to landlords. I explored how we could strike a balance between a clear information hierarchy that would make it easy for landlords to find relevant information at a glance and a more friendly and warm way to present tenants.
In my wire framing, I arrived at a design where the data points collected from the tenant would be summarized into paragraphs of text by AI, as opposed to presenting each data point as a list of data. This made for a more qualitative feel, where tenants were presented in text that felt as if written by a human, making them feel more like real people than a set of variables.
I employed strict paragraphs with headings for different data types in order to make it easier for landlords to still jump into a profile and find certain information at a glance. I prototyped my design by finding a few diverse real tenants on the Qasas platform, writing down their hard data, sending them to Chat GTP, and creating profiles with the returned texts.
In addition to collecting structured data from tenants, I employed ways to inject some of the tenants personality into the profile ad in an easy way. This is done by presenting tenants with a list of personal and fun questions that they can select 3 from and answer them in a personal way.
Making profiles feel warmer and editorial happens at the expense of easily glanceable datapoints in profiles, so this design is quite radical and will need to be evaluated further to see if the tradeoffs are beneficial to landlords who are looking for tenants. This design also presumes that landlords have used Qasas powerful filtering and matching features in order to only be browsing tenants where their hard requirements are already satisfied.
I presented the design concept and prototypes to a designer at Qasa, and we decided to proceed with this concept.
After having agreed on the UX concept with Qasa, I moved on to the final UI design of the profile. I referenced Qasas brand guidelines, design system and a few select reference pages in order to build a profile that was on brand and in line with the rest of their product.
The final delivery to Qasa included a list of data that should be part of the tenant ad creation wizard, a new concept for how to present the data to landlords on the tenant ad and a new high- fidelity UI design.
The final delivery included the above in a presentation explaining the details of the project to the design team at Qasa, who will take over the project and bring it to their development teams.
