As a team, we were tasked with designing, refining, and developing a working application prototype as an exercise in the full UX design process. I served as a researcher, developer, and the primary interface designer. After our research and design phase we performed user testing, refined our concept according to feedback, and developed the prototype in Flutter via Android Studio.

The scope of our user base was provided for us, namely students attending the Univeristy of Minnesota. From that base, we considered problems affecting students that could be solved using an app. We settled on the rental market, which is something most students are forced to delve into on a yearly basis. Since the rental market is diverse and obtuse, we thought that a platform for crowdsourced reviews for both properties and landlords could cut down on some of the mystery of finding new rentals.

Folowing this ideation, we performed inital user interviews in order to distill main points of focus for our application:

During our discovery phase we defined user goals and key design aspects to consider during the development phase. Following this, we performed interviews with representative users in order to define the key aspects users would be looking for in our application. From these key aspects, we were able to present users with sketches and mockups in order to distill how the design should accomplish these goals.

After designing and developing our working prototypes, we used them to perform guided user studies. These studies consisted of several predefined tasks monitored by our research team. From these studies, we were able to learn about how users behaved with our application, and how the application behaved in response to user input.

After completing user studies and compiling our data we were left with user's impressions of our solution, and some suggestions for future improvements. Users found the interface to be easy to navigate and understand, while also providing sufficient amounts of information in each view. Users also found some of the interface elements awkwardly sized, which would be an easy fix in future revisions. As for future revisions, our findings suggested that any futher versions should have richer application features (they found the prototype limited in ability) and have their layout adjusted for sizing and arrangement.