Design Phase
Design research
Research was conducted primarily by reviewing competitors in the online property market as well as incorporating modern trends in UI/UX design. Daft and Airbnb were evaluated as examples of near identical competitors to Rent.ie as they implement a heavily overlapping
feature set. The competitors have similar navigation to each other and to Rent.ie.
A user begins on a landing page where they are required to submit search terms before moving to a listings page where the user is offered properties to select from. Once a listing is selected the user moves toan advert page dedicated to the individual listing.
Both sites have a home pages with a large hero image taking the majority of the screen. On top of this image both sites have a search box which allows the user to add their search terms before continuing onto a listings page.
The listing page is where the two evaluated competitor sites differ in their approach with Daft focusing a large amount of screen real estate on the first search result, with large distracting commercial advertisements unrelated to the property results. In contrast, Airbnb gives a significant amount of space over to a map of results locations with a condensed list of results taking up the remainder of the screen. On both sites it is possible to select a listing and move onto that individual advert.
It was identified that adding a “save ad” button to each of the adverts on the listings page would allow the user to save multiple adverts to a saved list, allowing the user to refine their search for an appropriate property. During brainstorming it was suggested that adding a save
button to the search terms also would allow the user to move through the site quicker by eliminating the need to input their search terms each time they revisited the site encouraging repeat use.