A Traveled Path:
Prototyping Improvements
Background
A Traveled Path Housing came to the UX Design students at Prime Digital Academy asking us to take a look at their site and prototype some suggestions for added functionality.
ATP Housing is a beta site meant to help connect traveling nurses with affordable and safe short-term housing. Their goal is to become the go-to solution for traveling healthcare professionals. They consider AirBnB to be an indirect competitor, and Furnished Finder to be a more direct competitor.
They have two very distinct set of user: traveling nurses and property owners. While the specifics of their user goals are different, fundamentally the user goal is to connect those two groups and make their interactions easy and safe for both parties.
Methods and Deliverables
Cognitive walkthrough
Contextual inquiry interviews
Figma prototyping
Cognitive Walkthrough
A cognitive walkthrough* of the site didn’t bring up too many issues - the site was functional with no major usability blockers. However, there were some points where the site could be built out a bit more to suit the needs of both the traveling nurses and the property owners, as well as just making it broadly more usable for anybody.
This was a good way to start out - as a form of client intake - and really get a sense of the site and every interaction that users can have with the site and between pages. Doing this early made the rest of the project, and later reconstructing the site in the prototype, a lot easier.
*A Cognitive Walkthrough is the process of going through tasks on the site and determining whether they pass muster on a number of different requirements: visibility/hierarchy, consistency and mapping, feedback, etc.
Contextual Inquiry
The team was able to interview both a property owner and a nurse in order to get a better sense of the needs of the group. Because they weren’t users of the site already, these were Contextual Inquiry interviews. The team was able to ask them about what they currently do to manage the problems that ATP Housing hopes to solve, so we were able to see how ATP Housing can fill those needs even better.
The traveling nurse told us about what they look for in their traveling housing currently, highlighting what makes a traveling nurse different from an average vacationer - such as odd commuting hours and the desire for a quiet neighborhood. The property owner gave us a walkthrough of their current management setup - down to the spreadsheets and their current advertising site.
Interviewing both types of users was very insightful - they both brought up very different experiences and ideas for added functionality. It really drove home the points where their user experiences were different, but also where they overlapped and could both benefit from changes. Getting these interviews in early in the process informed the team going forward, as their experiences provided inspiration for user stories and scenarios that shaped the proposals and will be shared to the client to form the way they consider the changes.
Planning
An obvious step, but an important one. The cognitive walkthrough and contextual interviews gave the team what they needed to develop some user stories and scenarios. Those user stories were what inspired the suggested changes and functionality for the site.
The focus was on building upon what the site already had, and finding details could be added to improve the experience for both of the main user groups. Many of these changes were able to help both user groups. For example, adding filters to the search functionality allows the travelers to find housing that fits all of their needs - from price, to having pets - and allows owners to specify what they do and don’t want for their properties - allowing pets, or requiring minimum stays, etc.
Prototyping
Then came the fun part!
This prototype was built in Figma. It doesn’t recreate every page of the site - it focuses on the main user flows and the pages with added improvements and functionality. The client also provided a style guide they are planning to switch their site over to, so I was able to use that when building out the additions.
Below, I’ve included the prototype, as well as a video of me demo-ing and explaining the changes I made, but a quick rundown of the biggest changes are:
Adding the specific hospitals and the dates search to the main search bar
Changing the search results page to default to a map to show the results
Adding filtering on the search results page
Moving the “Become and Owner” button to the home page
Adding a new page for owners to describe why they should list their properties on the site.
If you’re really interested, there’s also a link to the full Figma file, with annotations, here.
What I Learned and Next Steps
Going forward, the client can take the feedback and suggested prototypes from the team and figure out what they want to change or add before the site leaves beta mode.
This project was a great opportunity to further develop my Figma and prototyping skills, as well as working on a project that had two very distinct user groups. It was a good challenge to find ways that the two user groups could both benefit from the same improvements, and other ways that they needed their separate experiences developed. It broadened the way I will try to think about users in the future - breaking them down into their unique groups and needs, while also trying to find ways to benefit every type of user as much as possible is something to keep in mind going forwards.