HOMEWISE
By Hayley Williams
Contents The First Idea – Housing...... 4 First Idea Mind Maps ...... 5 What already exists? ...... 6 The Little House Company ...... 6 House Web ...... 6 What others are there? ...... 6 Secondary Idea – To-do List with an RPG Twist ...... 7 The Idea ...... 7 Your Character ...... 7 Second Idea Mind Maps ...... 8 What already exists? ...... 10 Epic Win ...... 10 HabitRPG ...... 11 Chosen Idea ...... 12 The House Selling Process (WITHOUT AGENT) ...... 13 Getting your property ready ...... 13 Taking photographs ...... 13 Floorplans ...... 14 Energy Performance Certificates ...... 15 Pricing your property ...... 15 Getting your For Sale/Rent sign ...... 15 Showing your house to prospective buyers ...... 15 Accepting an offer ...... 16 Negotiating ...... 16 Main and Secondary Competition ...... 17 Main ...... 17 The Little House Company ...... 17 House Web ...... 18
1 House Ladder ...... 19 Nest Hunter ...... 20 Secondary ...... 21 Tepilo ...... 21 Property Wishes ...... 22 Project Goals ...... 23 Overview ...... 23 Objectives ...... 23 Features & Benefits...... 24 Original Planned Features ...... 24 Searching ...... 24 Posting ...... 24 Browsing ...... 24 Sale Process ...... 24 Help Section ...... 25 Extra ...... 25 Features for 1.0 ...... 25 Features for 2.0 ...... 26 Features for 3.0 ...... 26 Future Phases ...... 26 Time Management ...... 27 For Sale, To Rent ...... 30 User Research ...... 31 Defined primary User Groups ...... 31 Types of Research ...... 31 Some of the research that could be done are: ...... 31 Survey Results ...... 33 Individual selling laws/rules ...... 42 Target Audience ...... 43 Personas ...... 44
2 Mobile User Journeys ...... 46 Desktop User Journeys ...... 48 Descriptive Words ...... 55 Styleboard ...... 56 Moodboard ...... 57 First Drafts ...... 58 Second Draft ...... 59 Final Draft ...... 60
3 The Ideas This idea comes from my love of house hunting and property developing. There are already plenty of house search websites and app available but there are not many that bypass the estate agents huge fees and let you sell on your own.
The First Idea – Housing This idea comes from my love of house hunting and property developing. There are already plenty of house search websites and app available but there are not many that bypass the estate agents huge fees and let you sell on your own.
For this website, I want to have a place that people who want to sell or rent their house out, can post an advert for a fraction of the cost it would be to sell through an agency. They will bypass the whole estate agency so as to keep the fees to a minimum, but also giving them somewhere to advertise their property quickly and easily. The hope is to allow their property to be posted on at least the two main property websites in the UK, Rightmove & Zoopla as an extra. You are not able to post as a property owner on those sites, only as an agency. So they would be placed on them through us.
From experience using some of these existing property sites, they look and feel outdated. I want to totally redesign into a more modern, intuitive and flat style for this site. It will be ‘mobile first’ starting with the app and building out from there, but still been feature rich, without been clogged up.
The plan is to have the ability to make a free account first and be able to get used to the site, or sign up as you post a property. I also want the’ add a property’ form to have plenty of options to make searching for a house much easier. You will have a clean dashboard style logged in section to make it simple and easy to use.
Not only will you be able to add your property and sell it yourself, but there will be guides and a help section to smooth out the process. Selling is not as simple as just posting your house and accepting money. I want to be able to help people get their property ready for viewings, help them sell, answer questions about selling/renting and as much information as possible about everything else. As well as having budget and money saving calculators to help.
4 First Idea Mind Maps
5 What already exists? There are two that I have found to be the most popular, The Little House Company and House Web. The Little House Company http://thelittlehousecompany.com/
This one is the better looking of the two, though still a bit dated. Their social media icons overlap the ‘call us today’. House Web http://www.houseweb.co.uk/
This one looks ancient with an old forum style look to it and at the time of writing, wasn’t even loading up at all. What others are there? There is another I looked at called Property Wishes. This one seems to be more like Righmove in that it just lists houses from agents. This one looks really nice but it is unfinished, some things don’t work properly and it feels like they just take property feeds off other sites to fill out there list. https://www.propertywishes.com/
6 Secondary Idea – To-do List with an RPG Twist The Idea There are hundreds of thousands of apps today and hundreds of them are in some form, a to-do or organizational app. So there are plenty of ways and styles to organize your life with to-do lists, habits, calendar and more. Now there are lots less that make it fun and less ‘chore’ like.
I want to create an app that turns ‘chore’ into an adventure! The idea is that you can bring your love of games into something you wouldn’t normally care much about and turn it into something positive. There is a little gamer inside all of us, is there not?
Upon starting up the app, you will sign up using email and create a password and then you are able to choose a theme/world based on your personal interests. This could be anything from fantasy (default) to Sci-fi, with more unlockable and purchasable themes available later. Next you get to choose a character out of the ones available with your chosen theme and name it. Will talk about this more as time goes on.
Now you have your account and character ready, you can start adding items to your to-do list (and more). The plan is to use these as quests/missions to reward you with some form of (pretend) currency that you can use to purchase (pretend) loot. I want you to see armour/weapons on your character when you equip it in your inventory.
Your Character Now that you got the gist of it, let’s get on to what happens after. My hope is to make the app a social experience as well as a solo one. Once your characters are geared and ready, you will be able to fight monsters and creatures as part of the main story. There also will be the ability to group up for battle that would normally be too punishing for the solo player. I want to limit the amount of battles you can have in some way or another, to make sure the gaming aspect doesn’t take priority over the whole reason for having the app.
7 Second Idea Mind Maps
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9 What already exists? After a good search, two apps stand out the most.
Epic Win http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/
The first been EpicWin, an app available only on the App Store at a cost of £1.99. This is, though I am unable to have a play with it other than watching Youtube videos, seems to look very pretty. It is limited in what you can do though. You can have your own character out of a few starter ones and a couple that you can buy from the in- app store. You level up your character using the to-do list and get loot as you go. There doesn’t seem to be anything that brings gaming into it though. There seems to be nothing you can do with the loot, or battles you can do with your character. From what I’ve seen, it seems to be best suited to a collector or loot. But it does look great and it’s animated!
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HabitRPG https://habitrpg.com/static/front
This one takes quite a different approach by allowing not only a to-do list, but also a dailies and a habit section. You level up your character by completing these tasks and you take damage by missing or not completing your tasks. You can level up and spend gold on equipment, pets and mounts and take your character into battling bosses and world bosses. There is a whole social aspect to this app, where you can make groups and guilds, meet friends and battle together. This has so much more, but for me the design just looks like an ordinary to-do app with an added character at the top. They have the desktop version that is the better version over the app they have. They have a ton of bad reviews for the app version but I guess they are still working on it so I would not be surprised if it’s nice and smooth over a few months’ time. Did I also state that it’s free?
11 Chosen Idea I have looked into both of my ideas and planned how I would create them. But I have chosen to go with the housing website as I think this has more commercial value and less competition. HabitRPG is newly made and has a whole team working to make it a really great app and trying to outdo that would be quite difficult.
The other housing sites are very dated and lacking some things I would like to have, that I feel that I could make something much more.
For the purposes of this project, I decided to design it conceptually as a full desktop website, as to show its full potential. If I were to be designing this for a real company, I would have started it ‘mobile first’.
12 The House Selling Process (WITHOUT AGENT)
Getting your property ready As the seller you should make the effort to make your property look its best. Tidy away all that clutter as nobody wants to see your mess, give the whole house a good spring clean. Get all the decor to neutral tones and make it all look presentable for the buyer. This is all super important, most people cannot see through mess and bright colours to see what it could look like to them.
Don’t forget the outside!
Taking photographs Now it’s time to take photos of each room and the gardens. It’s important that you get the shots from the right angles so the viewer can see as much of the room as possible.
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Floorplans There are a few ways you can get a floor plan of your house. One been a local surveyor, but this will cost you money. There are also app’s that will scan your room for you but they are quite simple and limited. Or you could measure each room with a trusted tape measure and use a web app to draw it up yourself.
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Energy Performance Certificates In the UK, a property must have an Energy Performance Certificate when a house is bought, sold or rented. You must send off for one ‘before’ you try to market your property. It is very important you do this as soon as possible.
Pricing your property You can use sites like Rightmove or Zoopla to check sold prices in the area. You can always use local estate agents to value your house for you, you don’t have to sign a contract with them.
Getting your For Sale/Rent sign Once signing up to a site to market your house, you will receive a For Sale or For Rent sign that will also have your phone number on it. You can then hammer than in somewhere in the front part of your house.
Showing your house to prospective buyers Without an agent, this is going to be your responsibility. It will be challenging for someone who works a lot but it is possible to work around that. There is always a risk from inviting strangers into your home, so it’s best to have a friend or family member
15 there with you. Also if you’re busy with work, you could get a family member or friends to show your home for you.
It may also be good for you to write down common questions so you don’t forget when the next person asks. Also it’s good to write down an inventory, so the buyer know what’s they are getting.
Accepting an offer You can accept an offer over the phone, face to face or by writing, but it’s not final or legal till exchange or contracts. This is the time when you should find a solicitor or conveyancer. You can do it yourself but it is lots of paperwork and not recommended to anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing.
Negotiating This can be tough even for people with experience. My first key point would be to make sure you have got your own home inspection done before putting your house on the market. This way you know what might be wrong that you can address instead of finding out later when a buyer has one done.
16 Main and Secondary Competition Main
The Little House Company
Description: This is one of the first ones I can’t across when searching ‘sell your house yourself’. They have been around since 2000 and say they have an excellent reputation appearing on TV, radio and recommended by consumer magazines, money saving websites and national newspapers. They site is looking quite dated now.
Pros: Also has an online agency package. No Commission. 14 day free trial.
Cons: Seems that currently they only offer the online agency package. Limited refining features. Slow when browsing properties. Can’t make pictures full screen. Dated design.
Costs: Normal package: ? | Agency package: £420
Website: www.thelittlehousecompany.com
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House Web
Description: This is one of the ugliest sites of the few I found. It looks like an old forum from the 90’s! The prices on the site to post are quite decent as well as the costs for the signs. It’s not very user friendly but it does have quite a bit of information on the site if you can find what you’re looking for.
Pros: Simple to post a property, can buy a for sale/rent sign, good prices, can order EPC from them.
Cons: Really old fashioned design, looks like an old forum, doubled navigation, not responsive, house prices 2 years old.
Website: www.houseweb.co.uk
18 House Ladder
Description: This site is very horrible to look at, I’ve never seen so many highlighted words on a page before. It’s also the longest homepage I’ve seen in a long time! They make it look worse with all the animated adverts plastered all over the site. Their FREE eBook is just as full of highlights as the site, exactly the same design style.
Pros: You can post an ad for FREE, plenty of guides, news seems up to date.
Cons: Date design, even worse navigation.
Costs: Free – £149.99
Website: www.houseladder.co.uk
19 Nest Hunter
Description: This one feels better to use than some of the others, with a nicer design. It seems to be completely free to post your house for sale or rent, but doesn’t seem to be connected with any of the large companies like Rightmove or Zoopla. Doesn’t seem to have much information on the site to help with the buying/renting processes and lacks for sale/rent signs.
Pros: It seems to be completely FREE, looks nice, easy to post a property, has printable window cards.
Cons: Not posted to big sites like Rightmove/Zoopla, no for sale/rent sign.
Costs: Free
Website: www.nesthunter.co.uk
20 Secondary
Tepilo
Description: Been an online agent instead, this offers you basically the same as an ordinary agent, but mostly online and for much less money. I wanted to add this as the overall look and feel of the site is quite nice and modern.
Pros: Posted on large property portals, get help from actual agents, can get a EPC done, can get professional floorplan and virtual tour done.
Cons: Costs a few hundred, error for me when signing up!
Costs: £495 – £1090
Website: www.tepilo.com
21 Property Wishes
Description: From a design perspective, this one really stands out! It has a great look to it with a modern flat design and colour scheme. In my mind this is the kind of style I would have gone with. Vectors, soft pastel colours. It doesn’t seem to be used, it feels like those properties were pulled from other websites.
Pros: Beautiful, easy to use, simple navigation.
Cons: Doesn’t feel finished, pulled property from other sites, blurry photographs, requires mobile number, sign up page send you to to a welcome page (small bit of text) instead of your account page, no way to add property.
Costs: Unable to find
Website: www.propertywishes.com
22 Project Goals
Overview The initial idea for this website, was to help homeowners sell or rent their homes without the need for a costly estate agent. By removing the agents we would be saving them thousands in agent fees and charging them only a fraction of the cost. They will bypass the whole estate agency so as to keep the fees to a minimum, but also giving them somewhere to advertise their property quickly and easily. The hope is to allow their property to be posted on at least the two main property websites in the UK, Rightmove & Zoopla as an extra, possibly Prime Location. You are not able to post as a property owner on those sites, only as an agency. So they would be placed on them through us. From experience using some of these existing property sites, they look and feel outdated. I want to totally redesign into a more modern, intuitive and flat style for this site. The plan is to have the ability to make a free account first and be able to get used to the site, or sign up as you post a property. I also want to add a property form to have plenty of options to make searching for a house much easier. You will have a clean dashboard style logged in section to make it simple and easy to use. Not only will you be able to add your property and sell it yourself, but there will be guides and a help section to smooth out the process. Selling is not as simple as just posting your house and accepting money. I want to be able to help people get their property ready for viewings, help them sell, answer questions about selling/renting and display as much information as possible about everything else. As well as having two budget and money saving calculators to help. Objectives
To design a web app and/or mobile app that’s clean, simple and intuitive To make sure it is informative for all parts of the buying process To make it easy to post houses with plenty of property details
23 Features & Benefits
Original Planned Features
Searching Location Search – You can search for property using your current location (phone). Specific Search – Search for a specific location. Draw Search – You will be able to draw or mark out an area on a map to search within. Travel Search – You will be able to search by the time it would take you to travel from, by mode of transport and set time. Posting Phone photos – Take and post photos right from your mobile straight to your posting. Can add up to 30, but can only show a limited number depending on how much you pay for. Can change when you want. Browsing What’s near me – Can find out what restaurants, shops etc are nearby a property. Can look around your current location. Can search a location and look what’s near. Town Ratings – Can check the ratings (user generated) of a town. Schools – Shows nearby schools of a property with info and links. House Pricing – Show stats of house pricing by searching a location, looking at a specific property or your current location. Directions – You can get directions to a property you are looking at, this is sent to Google maps in the browser or phone sat nav app. Save Favourites – Click a star to save properties into your Favourites list. Sale Process Sale Guide – Takes you through each step of the selling/buying process, mark off each step as you complete it. Custom printable documents – Printed from property post with custom logo and information from the property posting.
24 Help Section eBook guides Blog/News Savings calculators and budget calculators. Extra Location Alerts – Location based alerts to let you know if you’re near a house within your set search conditions. Property Alerts – Periodically alerts/emails you of properties. Seller/Landlord Alerts – Reminds owners of a property posting to change its status, to let searchers know. Window Card – Printable window cards for your posted properties. Site statistics – For example, total savings of commission, total sold through us, total rented through us etc. Features for 1.0 Even though this project is only conceptual, I wanted to go through the features I would have in each stage of the website as it goes live.
For the very beginning I want to keep it simple without over loading it with features, as I think it would be best to make the site work correctly with minimal bugs and add things as we go. Features Sell your home yourself (most importantly) Guides (blog style) Email reminders fore sellers and buyers Free account Pay for each listing instead of monthly
25 Features for 2.0 For the second live phase I would want to add more details to the buyer side of the site.
This is where I would add the good schools guides and different types of searching. Features Good school guide Draw a search Distance based searching (within 3 mile walking/driving distance for example) Mobile Features Location based alerts Location based searching
Features for 3.0 This is a big update, by adding the ‘what’s near me’ content. As I wrote in my proposal, I would like to add a section on a property or your current location, that shows what’s nearby. For example, ATM’s, pubs, café’s or Theatres. Features Calculators What’s near me/property
Future Phases As with the first three stages, I would continue to add extra features from the list above until all of the features are added.
26 Time Management
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29 For Sale, To Rent You could partner up with a company like www.buildasign.co.uk and use these to ship out customized signs to your customers, as an example. Though it would be best to make a sign design using Photoshop or Illustrator in the right dimensions and tell a company to make a sign in that design. Build a Sign’s editor is a little basic.
30 User Research
Defined primary User Groups
People Selling a house People buying Landlords
For this project, I am going to focus on the people selling and landlord’s user groups. The reason for this is because the people buying the properties will most likely find them on the big portals like Rightmove etc.
Types of Research Some of the research that could be done are:
Card Sorting Surveys Interviews Focus Groups User Testing
31 For this project I have posted a survey onto 3 forums, moneysavingexpert.com, ukpropertyforums.com and landlordzone.co.uk. Though I didn’t get enough results to make it useful, I did manage to find out a bit about my target audience.
Another thing I did was talk to a few people on the same forums. I will be using these notes later for my personas.
32 Survey Results
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As you can see, I only got a few results in the time I had this survey up and I wasn’t able to add any more questions to Survey Monkey on the free account. If I were to do this again, I would pay for a premium account and post this in more locations and for a longer period of time. The only way to make this really useful is to get as many results as possible.
41 Individual selling laws/rules
Over on the Gov.uk website, it gives you pointers in what you need to think about:
Buying or selling a home normally takes 2 to 3 months. The process can take longer if you’re part of a chain of buyers and sellers.
There are several steps you’ll need to follow:
sellers must provide an Energy Performance Certificate for the property if a seller is using an estate agent, potential buyers must make any offers through the agent once a buyer’s offer has been accepted, the seller’s responsible for drawing up a legal contract to transfer ownership an offer isn’t legally binding until contracts are exchanged depending on the amount given for property, the buyer may have to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax
42 Target Audience
From my survey results and from talking to people on a few forums I learned:
the age group for people interested participating in the survey 45-54 most people would prefer to sell themselves most people found selling with agents OK or Terrible and most people have never sold a house themselves
So I have concluded that my target audience is people aged 45-54 with house selling experience. So I would need to build something easy to use in the case that some are not as tech savvy as others.
43 Personas
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45 Mobile User Journeys
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47 Desktop User Journeys
This the homepage. You can search from here, sign up and find out more.
There will be a search box here, which you can look for property or sell/rent your own.
Here will be selection of featured properties. These show when people posting pay extra.
48 You can change the view of the results from grid, list or map view.
You can use this side menu to refine or change your search results.
49 Once you select a You can view the property, you will see images, map location, all of its details. street view and floorplan. Not only do you have all that info, but you can also view around me. Displaying shops, schools, bars and loads of other things too.
Here will display the written details of the property and also a mini version of the map location.
50 You can save and edit your personal details in this section. You can view guides and checklists to help you with the buying process.
You can save a property, this will then display in your dashboard after you
make an account.
51 This is the seller’s dashboard. It looks very similar to the buyer’s version. But it also has a ‘create a sign’ button.
This is your list of properties you are selling or renting out.
Where the last property in your list ends, there will be a button to add a new one.
52 Here is the ‘create a sign’ section. You can choose out of the templates or use a blank one.
Though there are templates, they are fully customizable.
53 Lastly here is the sign builder. You can add text, add clipart or Over here will be your upload your own. editing panel. Changing colours, font etc.
54 Descriptive Words
I have picked these words out by looking at other sites of today. Because the trends push a certain style as its most popular, I want to use this style to design my own. Modern flat design is probably the most common right now.
55 Styleboard
This is the style of design that I was seeing the most, the pastel colours and the large blocks of colour. The simple types of icons are hugely popular right now, and they do look good. Another thing I see used often are the background images with a blur effect, it really brings out the foreground which ‘is’ the most important part.
56 Moodboard
These are the four main images that just felt right when thinking about the site I want to design. Modern is the first thought I had, keeping it up to date with trends and updating the typical look you see with housing sites. Apart from modern, I want to use the colourful design that the current trends show, which brings me to playful. But the most important part for me is that the site is useful in helping people sell their houses and keeping their costs down to a minimum.
57 First Drafts 1 2
1: The idea was to have the boxes at the bottom for information or to link to important tools or pages. The tabs at the top ‘For Sale’ and ‘For Rent’ will NOT change the page, but instead only change the search parameters.
2: This is the second draft of the design, though the background grey colour will probably have to change. On the first draft, there are boxes I was going to use for information, I think I will still add them to this but underneath the featured property scroller.
58 Second Draft
This is a start of a new draft with different colours but a similar style. This really changed in colours and this is where I decided to create the design in full desktop to show more of the sites potential.
59 Final Draft
This is where it evolved to and this is the design I settled with. From then on I tweaked the layout for the tabbed boxes and added the footer. The other pages grew from here and the design was kept throughout the site.
You can see the entire design in the Design Document.
60 Future Considerations If this was going in to development and not a concept, I would be looking at building this in the Bootstrap frontend framework. This would be for the desktop version only, though it will be responsive I would probably still want a stand alone app version.
For making this site function properly on the desktop version, I would use PHP as the back end. It is widely known and has everything I would need to make this site work. Though for speed of building this site, I would also use a framework like Laravel or CodeIgniter.
For the app version, I would have a look at using Java or at least get someone knowledgeable to help on the building of it. I would most likely start out with an android version to start with and then adding the iOS version after.
61 Custom Agreement Documents Something like the image bellow. I wanted it to make a printable version of an agreement document like you see here that would be customized to the property you print it from. This ended up not being in the final design but I would love to add it in the future.
62 Conclusion At the end of this project I really feel I needed more time to make this fully finished. I spent a lot of time at the beginning not being sure which idea to go with. But I do think that I made the right choice as to which one to choose.
Once I got started with housing app/website idea it got more complicated than I was expecting. I originally wanted it to have a fully working step by step walkthrough when selling/buying a property, that would guide you thought each process and help with filling out forms and when to talk to a solicitor. But researching this process was quite difficult and that plan sort of got pushed out of the design.
By the end of this project I feel that even though the designs turned out well, I also missed out on making the ‘Concept Document’. This was going to be the fancy booklet detailing my design and concept as though it was a proposal for a professional company. But with my personal circumstances changing and also working at a web design company, I ran out of time and this never got completed. It is a shame but it would have taken quite a bit of my time as I think designing for print is its own thing and uses different skills that I don’t feel that I have.
It has been a long and windy road and now its finally getting to the end I am quite happy that all these skills that I’ve learned can come with my into my job and any future companies I join. Overall I am very excited to see what the future holds for me as well as my fellow class mates. I also want to thank Sally and Kev for guiding me through all of this and making me improve my skills and designs. I am very glad I decided to choose web design over games design and think it is really the career for me.
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