A Traveled Path Homes

A housing website hoping to connect traveling healthcare professionals with safe and seamless short-term property rentals. Through a contextual inquiry, cognitive walkthrough and user research, I developed a mid-fidelity redesign of key site pages to better address user goals, clarify language, and increase organizational trust.

The Problem

The Covid-19 pandemic proved a challenging and isolating time people all around the world. The impact of of the pandemic on traveling nurses has been particularly significant - reshaping their roles, experiences, and the demand for their services. With healthcare systems overwhelmed and facing staffing shortages, traveling nurses became essential frontline workers, often deployed to areas hardest hit by the pandemic.

Sharpee Marshall, the creator of A Traveled Path Homes (ATPH), experienced first hand the dedication and struggle of frontline nurses, during her hospitalization due to the virus. Sharpee’s battle with Covid-19 became the catalyst to creating a business that accommodates and supports the frontline healthcare workers that took care of her so well in a time of need. Birthing the mission of A Traveled Path Homes — ‘a company dedicated to ensuring healthcare heroes have access to safe, comfortable, and convenient housing during emergency contracts.’

How might we ensure safe, comfortable, and convenient short-term rental housing for traveling nurses?

The Recommendation

While ATPH is in its Beta stage, collecting user data was beneficial for improving the site and ensuring the best service upon launch. Among the research data gathered, three themes emerged:

• Safety & convenience is imperative to nurses having a comfortable stay; add amenities filter, neighborhood safety rating, local store map, and property reviews.

• Rental property owners also need to value & trust this service provider; advertise reliable tenants with pre-screened tenant guarantee and add property management functions to help owners provide organized, efficient, and well-managed services.

• Words and clarity are important in defining the user experience; provide more direct language around what ATPH is offering and who the site is designed to support.

The Process

Understanding the Current Model

When I considered both a users ‘happy path’ and the competitive landscape, it was clear the most important revisions were increasing sites intent and making it more human-centered to reflect users goals and needs. Due to minimal findings from the cognitive walkthrough, our team created a primary user research protocol with scripted questions to gain insights for each user group. Our goal was to identify:

1. How traveling nurses are currently booking rental stays and what are their main pain points?

2. How rental owners are currently listing their property and what would make this service valuable to them?

3. How can this site improve to meet the wants and needs of both user groups

Understanding the Current User Journey

After the team conducted contextual inquiry interviews with our participants, we individually synthesized our key research findings. I found 28 significant research data findings, and based on these I created three primary user stories that would help me to emphasize user goals and needs while making design decisions. From the user stories and collected data, I focused my attention on three main areas : the onboarding mapping and informative language for both user groups; enhancing the property listings for nurses; creating project management flows for property owners.

(cognitive walkthrough findings)

After receiving the project brief, the team completed a cognitive walkthrough to determine what already exists on the Beta site and how well it was working. Individually, we conducted the cognitive walkthrough on smaller segments of user flow. Overall, we found good usability, consistency, mapping and hierarchy, with only minor revisions needed for better visibility and copy content.

Traveling Nurse - User Stories

User Story 1

As a traveling nurse, I want to rent in a safe and quiet neighborhood, so that when I come home from work in the middle of the night I feel safe and so that I can sleep in during the daytime. 

User Story 2

As a traveling nurse, I want to rent from an area that is centrally located and highly rated, so that I can easily find activities and feel connected to my new neighborhood.

Property Owner - User Stories

User Story 1

As a property owner, I want a pre-screening of tenants, so that I can save time and have better outcomes when interacting with potential renters.

User story 2

As a property owner, I want to keep track of all my rentals needs and tenants in one place, so that I can feel organized and save time.

Example participant - Traveling nurse Anita

“Nurses are shift workers, and we often get home at odd hours of the night. If I were relocating to a new area, I’d want to know my neighborhood is safe and relatively quiet. I think it would be cool too for my place to be centrally located so I could find everything I need.” - Participant A

“I use less personalized and screened sites like Zillow and Craigslist to find renters. It leads to a high amount of declines to rental requests. I only accept about 1 out of 50 applicants as a renter. Huge waste of time, it would be nice to have something more efficient and personal.” -Participant B

Example participant - Property Owner Josh

Making a Pivot

During the contextual inquiry interviews, our team discovered that both recruited participants were not the exact user groups of ATPH. The property owner did not specifically rent to medical professionals and had never engaged in short-term rentals. However, he was very excited by the concept of ATPH and provided detailed insight regarding the pain points of listing properties on other sites and ways that ATPH could serve and entice property owners to utilize this type of rental service to find tenants.

The nurse we interviewed had never been a traveling nurse and was only able to meet for half of the interview time. Prior to her interview, our team distilled what would be most valuable to learn from her in a short period of time. We decided not to conduct any usability testing but instead to focus on learning about her experience working as a nurse. We presented her with a scenario to imagine herself as a traveling nurse and discussed what would be important to her specifically as a nurse if utilizing a short-term rental service. She also shared her knowledge of close friends who are traveling nurses and different pain points they have experienced. Despite these changes, our team agreed that we had gathered valuable insights to positively impact the future of ATPH and the users it will serve.

KEY FINDINGS

Our team found that ATPH had high usability, with only minor changes recommended, the main findings were that users wanted more personalization and trust built into the sites offerings.

• Safety & convenience - The neighborhood needs to be reported to be safe, quiet, and centrally located and those details need to be clearly advertised and proven before they will feel safe to book the ATPH service.

• Value & trust - Property owners would most trust a service the guarantees pre-screened and reliable tenants. To provide the highest quality rentals and add value to property owners, ATPH could provide a property management and maintenance section to the site.

• Words and clarity - More clarity on what specifically ATPH was offering in comparison to it’s competitors was needed up front. Additional clarification is to show the site has two distinct user groups.

Interactive Prototype

Below are the solutions I made to address the key findings for the most important screens. The full user flow and a recorded explanation of all interactive screen pages can be viewed in this video walkthrough.

Homepage Changes

• Language - I composed new header copy to better resonate with the desires of the user groups, compelling them to engage, and succinctly conveying the site's purpose.

• Usability - I eliminated pop-ups in the location and number of traveler inputs to align with user mental models and streamline functionality. I shortened the main homepage image to eliminate the false bottom.

• Visibility & Findability - Created a call-to-action for property owners with a ‘List your Property’ button. I made the highlighted design blocks clickable to quickly guide users to informative sections to find out more about service offerings.

• Desirability - I added a filter drop down to allow more specificity to user searches

Property Search Changes

• Neighborhood Rating - I added a neighborhood safety rating to provide a sense of comfort

• Map - I added map that lists local stores and conveniences to provide convenience and introduce the area

• Property Rating - I added detailed and overall property ratings to provide insight to the property

Property Owner Page Changes

• Confirmation - I added a conformation guarantee of prescreening upon registering

• Dashboard - A once stop shop to see all listings, with a red-yellow-green light color coded visual to alert owners to the rental status of each property.

• Property Management - I added a management page for each listing, as well as, an editable maintenance page for owners to stay organized and conveniently keep properties up-to-date

Next steps

Due to significant time constraints, we were unable to engage primary users for research initially. After implementing the recommended changes, I would have liked to conduct a second round of contextual inquiry interviews with primary users to further enhance our understanding and gain additional insights into improving the platform's service. Additionally, I would have focused on refining the product design. I would prioritize developing a low-touch method for connecting renters and owners to streamline and improve their communication capabilities before and during the short-term rental experience. Lastly, I would advocate for property listings to incorporate video tours of the rentals to offer potential renters as much reassurance as possible during their decision-making process.

Further out recommendations could include:

• Design - Updating the platform with more compelling visuals and a logo based color palette.

• Incentive for testimonials - Enlisting individuals to stay at properties for a discounted rate to gain real testimonials and gain trust for future users.

• SEO Analytics - To further understand the audience and enhance connection to the target market