Family House Swap
UX Design
Family House Swap is a website for Families to swap homes for a holiday in exchange for no money - only a signup fee.
What we did:
Developed a website for people to upload the details of thier home, rent it out to gain tokens and choose someones home for a free holiday.
I Managed all stages of the project and worked alone.
Why we did it:
To help families with school children to have access to affordable holidays during the school holidays.
How we did it:
Research
User Interviews
Synthesis
Design
User Testing
Deliver
The Problem Space
I found that some parents of school age children had a problem in my community.
Due to the price hikes and lack of available holiday accomodation during the school breaks, many parents were struggling to afford and find a family holiday.
The Solution
I created a website for families/parents to be able to offer their own house for a family to stay in during the school holidays. In exchange for this the website would offer them 'Tokens' to be able to choose a home to stay in or do a straight swap. The only fee they would pay was the annual fee to sign up to the website.
The Process
Using the Double Diamond method of :
Discover Define Design Deliver
Discover
Research
User Interviews
I interviewed 6 Mothers of school age children.
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Age 28-40
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Live in Sydney
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Have Primary school/high school age children.
Preparing the questions
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I wanted to understand why there was this problem.
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I asked about financial commitments, mortgage etc.
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I asked about how many holidays per year they had.
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I asked if they would like more holidays.
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I asked what were the barriers to them having more holidays.
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I asked them what type of holidays they went on.
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I asked about what type of accomodation they prefer.
Define
Affinity Mapping
Key Insights
.......At this point in the process
I felt that the insights from the affinity mapping confirmed to me that there was a real problem.
Parents did not really want to take their children away from their education to go on holiday out of term time but due to holiday accomodation and flights costs inflated during this time it made it difficult to afford.
These were often the families that were under the most financial stress due to maybe only one parent in employment due to being the main caregiver.
These parents often had big mortgages/home loans.
Accommodation was often booked up making it difficult to find a holiday.
They wanted to give their young children the experiences of more holidays but the cost was too high.
Above all they felt it was unfair.
Persona
After identifying the needs, pain points and behaviours
I was able to create my Persona.
I was happy to get a full picture of this user.
I knew that 'Melissa' would help me move through the next phases of the project more clearly.
Problem Statement
This was the problem statement that came out of the research.
“Parents of school age children need to find affordable family breaks during the school holidays because they are currently seeing a lack of availability within thier budget”.
"How Might We Statement"
The How Might We statement that came out of our discover and define stage was:
“How might we help families to have more holidays at a lower cost.? ”
Design
Crazy 8,s
We decided to do a ‘design studio exercise’ to get our creative minds flowing and get as many ideas down as possible.
I did a round of crazy 8s to get some quick solutions.
I found that this really helped to get my ideas flowing.
I chose to go with the House swap idea as i felt this was more viable for more people.
Key Features
To ensure my solution stood out from the competition I decided it should have these key features:
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User would have to be able rent out their house (some people had experience of this through airbnb)
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The use of tokens gained from renting your house out would enable you to choose a free home to stay in.
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Only pay an annual fee
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Ability to do a straight swap
Key Benefits
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Only for families
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Focus on school holiday dates
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Save the user money
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Create more availbility in suitable accomodation.
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Families could choose houses with much needed baby/children equipment/toys for that home from home feel
Paper Wireframes
Creating the paper wireframes helped my quickly get my ideas out from my mind.
Storyboard
A storyboard helped for the tokens section.
Userflow
I created a userflow to enable me to create further wireframes and know how the wireframes will link up.
The Solution
Wireframes
I created mid fidelity wireframes in Figma and linked up the screens to create the prototype.
User Testing
I tested the prototype on the six users, 4 of those were the ones I had interviewed.
4 out of 6 users could not find the "Tokens" and did not understand how they worked.
To solve this problem I added a 'Token' Button to the main menu.
I also added some information on the tokens page to explain how the tokens work.
Thankyou.