OUGD504 - Design for Screen - 3 Solutions

Problem: The pressure of moving out of halls and looking for a new house after first year can be a daunting and stressful experience for a lot of students. Groups of friends either rush in too soon to get a good house, then realise they don't want to live with that group of people, or put it off until last minute and end up paying considerably more. Finding the perfect student house can be a long and tedious process and is mostly down to of luck.

Range of different distinct ideas to solve the problem:

1) An app that makes finding student housing easy, fun and simple where everything is in one place, and easy to use. 

Either search for a specific house using the filters on the landing page, being as specific or vague as you want and then scroll through every house available matching your search criteria, from all different letting agencies.

Students could take a picture of a house on the street and the details outlining the house's availability, rent, tenants, number of bedrooms, letting agents, reviews and landlords would appear. Then it would give you the option of booking a viewing or looking at similar houses available nearby. Similarly to how taking a picture of a barcode outlines a products nutritional information and brand etc. 

2) A website similar to rightmove and StuRents that uses a more simplistic, modern interface, making searching for student housing easier, stress free, more engaging and more fun. 

3) An interactive interface in a letting agents that speeds up the process of finding a house, by selecting the features you want before going on viewings and wasting time looking at houses you don't actually like or want to look round, simultaneously saving the estate agents time as well. 

The results from the surveys and focus groups indicated that most problems students encountered when looking for student housing would not be resolved through the design of an App of interactive letting agents screen.  The most relevant and useful design solution would be a website. This also resonated with the fact that over 97% of all the students I asked said they used a desktop to look for student housing as it had a bigger screen, felt more trustworthy and was faster.