In July 2018, I joined Jungdo UIT's business development team as a product design intern. During 5 weeks, I designed a primary minimum viable product of the Vietnam real estate mobile platform app with developers, UI designer, and PM. This experience helped me learn how to prioritize key app features while maintaining great level of user experiences.
• Planned and conducted user research and identified key opportunities.
• Designed different iterations of wireframes and interactive prototypes.
• Created a moodboard and style guide to show distinct brand identity.
• Worked closely with a UI designer and a product manager.
Jul 2018 – Aug 2018 (5 weeks)
1 UI Designer, 1 Product Manager
Design a mobile experience for Vietnamese who want to buy pre-sale apartments. This application is mainly focused on the needs of Vietnamese buyers, but should be applicable to any first time users.
Because of rapid economic growth and urbanization in Vietnam, countless people are moving to the cities and developers are building many apartments to accommodate those housing needs. Often, Vietnamese want to confidently and punctually secure a good pre-sale apartment, but cannot because current Vietnam real estate apps are not delivering best user experiences.
Design a simple and coherent MVP mobile app that greatly improves Vietnam pre-sale apartment buying experiences.
Vietnamese who are willing or planning to buy pre-sale apartments.
I’m totally new to the Vietnam real estate market. Understanding the interaction between real estate market and apartment buyers is crucial to design appropriate app for our target user. Who/Why/How buy pre-sale apartments? What are important criteria for buying pre-sale apartments?
My assumption can be different from what people really think. I need to clarify what are their real pain points in buying pre-sale apartment.
Within a limited time frame (5 weeks), I need to design an MVP that includes key features for buying pre-sale apartment in Vietnam.
While the primary app for the Vietnam real estate community, Batdongsan is filled with too much text that do not make immediate sense to the user. It takes unnecessary amount of time for user to find relevant information. Also, irregular spacing and monotonous colors prevent seamless user experiences.
Vietnam’s oldest real estate app, Nha Tro Tot fails to follow the modern trend of the UI design. The app uses confusing text overlays and overly contrasting colors that reduce readability. While a reasonable amount of color contrast increases scan-ability, too much contrast often diminishes scan-ability.
I conducted user interviews with three different Vietnamese co-workers who had already bought an apartment or were planning to buy an apartment in near future to have a better understanding of their experiences and mental models in buying pre-sale apartments. Without understanding their pain points and mental models, I couldn’t figure out what features might be relevant to them.
A full list of interview transcripts and responses can be found here
1. Vietnam real estate apps lack reliability, completeness, and coherence
Often interviewees did a lot of legwork to find out information about pre-sale apartments due to the absence of a comprehensive real estate platform.
2. Recently married couples buy pre-sale apartments
All interviewees mentioned that Vietnamese who are recently married buy pre-sale apartments. They are often financially prepared and planning to have babies soon (Avg. 25 - 30 years old).
3. Prefer pre-sale apartments with great location, reasonable price, and good developer reputation
All interviewees favored an apartment that is close to the center of the city since it is more likely to have better neighborhoods, schools, and amenities.
From the interviews, I found similarities among interviewees’ responses. Applying this trend, I created a fictional persona Jane so that I develop empathy with a group of real users. Throughout my whole design process, I always referred back to Jane so that I design for real users not for ourselves.
To visualize steps that Jane has to go through to accomplish her goal, I created a journey map. This map represents her actions, feelings, and thoughts during her journey, allowing me to find opportunities to address her pain points throughout the journey.
Vietnam newlyweds want to find a pre-sale apartment with great price, location, and developer reputation. However, they have a hard time doing it because…
Vietnam real estate apps are confusing, incomplete, and hardly providing a comprehensive apartment searching experience.
The solution takes major pain points and needs of our target audience into accounts. Hence, this MVP app should be simple enough to easily navigate through but comprehensive enough to prevent browsing different web sources. I created an information architecture to divide between primary features of MVP and secondary features of MVP. This diagram includes three key solutions: 1) Easy Apartment Searching 2) Simple and Relevant Search Filters 3) Detailed Apartment Information.
The two main user stories for searching are people who search pre-sale apartment by specific city/district, and people who search pre-sale apartment by project name. This information made it easy to include the placeholder text ‘City, District, Project Name’ within the search bar to hint users what to search for.
I tried to facilitate the searching process by providing multiple visual aids to users. On the first screen, the map shows number of available pre-sale apartment projects across different cities. By clicking numbered circles, users can see zoomed in map results like the fourth image without typing city. On the fourth screen, users can quickly tab among different apartment projects. On the fifth screen, the bottom block captures most important details like apartment price and location.
While people usually have specific price range or location in mind when searching for pre-sale apartments, they often have other important criteria to consider. Those criteria entails number of bedrooms, bathrooms, developer, constructor, and orientation. It was interesting to notice that Vietnam people culturally believe the orientation of the house as a key factor when choosing an apartment.
For clear interaction, I tried to address how the number of results are constantly updated as users input different filter options, shown on the fourth and fifth screen. I also included the reset button so that users can always restart their filtering without manually deselecting every option.
Since our target audience are Vietnam newlyweds who are planning to have babies soon, It was essential to include relevant apartment information to new families with babies. Families with babies preferred a pre-sale apartment with schools nearby, safe neighborhoods, and plentiful amenities. In addition, I included detailed overview and apartment description sections so people grasp a comprehensive view of different pre-sale apartments.
As the most important design element of this MVP app, I included a Call/SMS button so people can contact the developer and decide whether to buy an apartment or not.
Collaborating with the UI Designer Yen, we created a moodboard to come up with font, color, icons, and name for our app. We wanted the theme of our app to be trustful, simple, and innovative. After getting inspiration from logos of various real estate companies and brainstorming diverse ideas, we created a style guide for our app.
This 5 week internship was both challenging and rewarding. Under a tight deadline, I learned how to prioritize features and managed to finish the MVP version of the mobile app. More importantly, I learned how to be flexible with the design process as there are multiple methods you can utilize to solve the user’s problem. However, I was always cautious to have a clear problem that I’m solving for and constantly empathized with target users throughout the whole design process. In addition, multiple user interviews and user testings made me to realize that I should openly accept feedbacks and critiques since I’m not the user for the product. Overall, designing a mobile app from the scratch with the help of a product manager, a UI designer, and engineers was a truly meaningful experience.
1. Explore untouched features of MVP
2. Conduct more rounds of user testing
3. Design for apartment sellers