REAL ESTATE APP CASE STUDY

An aggregated real estate portal for Dar es salaam city.

Problem Overview

Dar es salaam, which is the business capital of Tanzania is home to over 5 million people, which provides a large market for residential properties as well as creating challenges to the real estate industry. 

There is no dedicated real estate portal in Tanzania and customers looking for properties to rent have to go through multiple platforms and/or use word of mouth to try and get a property.  This is time consuming and sometimes inconvenient and brings dissatisfaction to customers.

The purpose of the project was to look for the possibility of designing a real estate portal that allows customers to search for properties with ease.


Discovery: Research & Analysis

For my research I carried out interviews to learn about customers latest property search, how they did it, what they liked about the process and what were the pain points. Thereafter I carried out a survey to provide further insights and general views on some of the interview findings. 


Key findings


Tools used: Google Forms, Miro 


Discovery: Key Findings

53.3% of survey participants said that they go online to search for properties every time they are in need of one. 

93.3% of survey participants said that they like using Instagram to search for properties. 

Instagram is commonly used by real estate agents to show listings available in the market. Since a lot of people are already on Instagram it becomes convenient to visit an agent’s page to see listings. 


It’s also easy to share photos of properties.

13 out of 15  participants said that an aggregated real estate app will make their search for properties easier.

There is no dominant real estate platform in Tanzania, most agents rely on apps and websites with high traffic to post their listings.


As it is hard to combine listings from multiple agents on Instagram users turn to Zoom Tanzania, an ad listing website where they can find rental properties from multiple agents.


Feature Ideation

Based on the research, I used the findings to explore possible solutions and features.  and then used a prioritization matrix to find out which features I should focus on for a minimum viable product (MVP).

Design: Concepts & Sketching

Prototyping & Testing

After obtaining features that I needed to design a minimum viable product (MVP) I designed a low fidelity prototype, which I then tested with some of the interview participants who provided me with feedback on the design. 

Low Fidelity Screens - First Iteration

Low Fidelity Screens - Second Iteration

Key Insight from testing the low fidelity prototype

Tools used: Figma

High Fidelity Prototypes - First Iteration

User Testing & Feedback

After creating high fidelity prototypes I ran accessibility test to find out accessibility related issues. 

I recruited users for usability test who tested the high fidelity prototype using Lookback from which I made further improvements on the designs.

Tools used: Lookback


Key Insight from usability test

Users had to scroll back to the top of the screen every time they needed to filter property listings, because the button was hidden once they scroll down the screen. This increased the time they took to complete the filtering task.


Design Iteration

Updated the colors and font size on some parts of the design in order to improve accessibility.


Introduced a bottom navigation, which allowed to fix action buttons such filter button at the top so that they can easily be accessible even as the user scrolls down the screen.

Project Details

Platform: Mobile

Year: 2021

My role: UX Research, Wireframing & Prototyping, User Interface Design, Usability Testing