Accommodation for Students
The Project
Student accounts UX research project.
The client: A leading student accommodation website looking to launch a student account section to assist users in their property search and university experience.
The tasks: Conduct interviews with six students to understand their experience of finding accommodation and identify solutions to the issues they encountered. Conduct a competitive analysis of direct and indirect competitors covering areas such as:
Tone of voice
Good/bad features
Ease of use
UI Design
Customer support
Responsiveness
Load times
The goal: Learn as much as we can about student accounts on our competitor’s websites and identify the opportunities that would give us a competitive advantage.
Year completed: 2022
Methods:
Competitive Benchmarking
Depth interviews
Affinity Mapping
The Process
I approached this project first seeking to discover the competitive landscape by identifying best practice and conventions to emulate, as well as points of friction when setting up and using competitor’s student accounts. I then conducted depth interviews with students to better understand the issues they encountered. Using analysis techniques, such as affinity mapping, I synthesised my findings to define my understanding of the problems uncovered and identify solutions. Finally, I circled back to the competitive analysis to establish the degree to which those solutions identified might give a competitive advantage to the client.
Discover
Competitive Analysis
GOALS
Understand best practice to emulate and learn how other websites solve the problems I am trying to solve.
PROCESS
I carried out a features comparison of nine competitors - both direct and indirect - establishing commonality and the various approaches applied. Following that, I took a more extensive look at four of the competitors to further understand how competitors attempted to create a positive user experience.
Features comparison
Features comparison
Example of analysis for one competitor
Example of analysis for one competitor
Example of analysis for one competitor
Example of analysis for one competitor
Example of analysis for one competitor
Depth Interviews
GOAL
Gain an understanding of the experience of students looking for accommodation - what they are trying to do, how they approach the task and what the pain points are.
Define
Affinity mapping was used as a tool to organise interview material into five clear categories:
Property search experience
Group dynamics
Agent/landlord experience
Managing the property
Usefulness of accounts
Insights and specific opportunities relating to these categories were identified. Some opportunities were recognised by every student interviewed, whilst others were raised by only a few. By establishing the degree to which students identified with each opportunity, I was able to order them according to which resonated with students the most, either as a solution to a problem they experienced or as a suggestion made to improve the experience.
Opportunity 1 related to an issue encountered by every student interviewed. However, only one indirect competitor offered a solution. Similarly, 5 of the 6 students identified with Opportunity 2, which only one direct and one indirect competitor offered. Here were two clear areas in which a competitive advantage could be gained. Further opportunities were identified which could also be considered in the development of student accounts.
What did I learn?
This project has taught me the importance of digging deeper with users to understand the real issues, not just the ones which immediately present themselves. Whilst there were obvious quick wins in terms of tweaks to improve UX, the significant gains were made by looking beyond website functionality to how students actually organised themselves and communicated with one another during their property search. The insights and opportunities for competitive advantage were unexpected but compelling.
How was I challenged?
I was challenged to develop techniques to establish correlations between the competitive analysis and user interviews. Do the competitive analysis observations inform the interview process or do the needs identified from interviews direct what to analyse on competitor’s websites? In the end, I took the approach to take an overview of what competitors offer so that I could interview from an informed perspective. I then used the insights identified in interviews to circle back to the competitive analysis and see which competitors were taking advantage of those opportunities, thereby highlighting where the competitive edge would be.
What next?
The project goal was to research what students would need from a student account to improve the user experience, through competitive analysis and depth interviews. The next stage of research is to carry out a card sorting exercise to establish which features to prioritise.