OUGD504 - Studio Brief 2 - Property Apps Research

Right move has some great innovations to their app which makes it stand out above competitors. The school checker, nearest stations, street view and nearby sold places are some of these features however, there are multiple steps which complicate the process of finding these features. 5 stages have to be travelled through in order to just find the house location on a map, the map feature is arguably the most used and most crucial feature to have when trying to find a house to buy or rent. In principle, this is the most important and therefore should require the least amount of stages to reach within the app.

Zoopla is another successfully design application with features such as the monthly total bills calculator. It has also includes a similar feature to one of my initial concepts where all of the house locations are displayed efficiently on one map. This feature however still requires the user to input a specific postcode which creates an unnecessary, the user will most likely be in the area when trying to find a house, utilising features such as current location would be a more efficient approach.

PrimeLocation is possibly the most complicated and confusing application with 6-7 steps just to start locating any house. The houses then appear in list format which only allows the user to select one house at a time. The majority of the time house buyers will be wanting to view multiple houses instead of one specifically and therefore this list format creates a process which involves unnecessarily clicking in and out of each house to get back to this list format.

The one effective feature is the collaboration with google earth to give the viewer a ground eye 360 degree view of the street and house.

SpareRoom has successfully identified a problem and focused in resolving this within an app to stand out as a differentiation to its competitors. It uses profiles, much like that of a social media site, in order to contact individuals who have a room spare or who are looking for a room mate. One repetitive noticeable aspect within the app is the reoccurrence of members between the ages of 18-25, this insinuates that the target audience is directed specifically at students and therefore has been designed with elements taken from social media sites in order to relate to the younger generation. The direct messaging system has been extracted directly out of twitters layout and composition along with the search bar which is identical to Instagram's.

 Twitters Messaging System