Zumper Redesign — Improving the apartment rental experience
Shortening the applications process by increasing click-thru-rate of the Instant Apply feature
The Brief: The Kleiner Perkins Fellows Design Challenge — Redesign a feature of a KP company’s product. You are free to focus on any disciplinary area that you are strongest with: Visual Design, Interaction Design, User Experience, and/or User Interface Design
As a young professional who has lived in 6 cities around the world, the anxiety of moving and finding the right apartment to rent never ceases to fade away. When moving to highly competitive rental markets like London or San Francisco, finding an ideal rental home that fits your lifestyle and career needs can feel like a marathon. I’ve chosen Zumper in my redesign project because it seeks to address a problem that impacts us all —the home rental experience.
This case study is organized by:
- Research — Rental market insights
- Product —Learning from the hotel industry
- Opportunities — Expediting the rental journey
- Redesign solutions — Improving Instant Apply adoption
- Conclusion — Breakthrough insights and learnings
What is Zumper?
Zumper was founded to create a smooth, efficient, and transparent renting process for both tenants and landlords. They’re the first rental marketplace where tenants can search for and rent an apartment on their end-to-end platform. Zumper is a Series C startup that has raised $90 million to date with a mission to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel (we will revisit this later).
Research — Rental market insights
To familiarize with the rental market, rapid research into media discourse and conversations with experts helped me close the knowledge gap.
Craigslist and the beginnings of internet rental listings
Love it, or hate it, Craigslist is one of the earliest Internet-based innovations for the rental market. It quickly became a default search engine looking for millions of rent-seekers looking to find a new home and connect with a potential roommate. While it offers the highest listings volume of rental options and a universally recognized user interface, it faces its own set of challenges surrounding trust, credibility, and the lack of change.
To quote an article in the Slate: “Craigslist is, to borrow a favorite phrase of Silicon Valley, ripe for disruption. Its bare-bones website looks like a relic of the early 2000s — and its user interface has hardly changed since then, as a trip through the Internet’s Wayback Machine indicates.
Competitive landscape
As the digital economy matured and a new generation of digital native consumers have entered the market, Craiglist has largely remained the same. While Craiglist benefits from a universally recognized brand and user experience, new competitors with more design and tech-centric innovations have risen up to pit themselves against Craigslist’s dominant position.
For context, Craigslist reports “that it has more than 50 billion page views per month and 60 million monthly users in the U.S. alone (keeping in mind that this applies to its whole website, not the rental section alone).” Craigslist is estimated to have brought in over $1 billion in revenue in 2018. While dozens of competitors have risen in the market, from tech giant Facebook’s marketplace, major listings platform Trulia and Zillow, to more niche specialized brands, there is no short of players in the space.
Where is the opportunity for Zumper to come in?
Anthemos Georgiades, CEO, and co-founder of Zumper, says that the company was built in 2014 on the premise that there were already too many portals online that helped people search for apartments, from low-tech but popular sites like Craigslist through to Zillow and a plethora of classified offerings, both local and national.
“Everyone had done that already,” he said of the basic listings business. So instead the startup decided that it would focus on simplifying, speeding up and overall improving the whole process of renting.
— TechCrunch Ingrid Lunden
Product strategy — learning from the hotel industry
Zumper offers a unique value proposition that focuses on improving not only the ability to find an apartment to rent but address the rental experience for both renters and landlords. Zumper draws from a comparator industry — hotels — to communicate a meaningful vision.
Imagine a world where renting was as easy a booking a hotel
This is an exciting and practical vision for a more pain-free and expedited apartment rental experience. When I think of hotels — the “instant” element fulfills the need for speed and certainty across the booking experience. As a comparator in the short-term rental market, Airbnb’s instant booking feature comes to mind.
What makes the booking process for a hotel so easy?
- Trustworthy — the booking experience is standardized and consistent
- No middleman — there is no need for an added layer of a broker
- Transparency — price, and availability is updated in real-time
- Instant booking — there is no unnecessary approval process
What makes the current rental experience so painful?
- Time-intensive — scheduling multiple appointments can be a headache
- Uncertainty — approval process is not timely or guaranteed
- Competition — you compete with multiple people for the same unit
- Relationship-based — variables are not standardized and relies on people
- Inconsistencies —procedures vary depending on landlords
Examining the hotel vs rental booking experience, we can see comparable parallels in the booking experience.
The Opportunity: Expediting the rental process
Improve the rental experience by focusing on the needs of core user groups:
- Landlord needs for credible tenants
- Tenant needs for faster approvals process
Hypothesis
An increase in adoption of instant-apply will improve the quality of leads, landlord response rate, and ultimately the conversion rate.
Expert interviews were conducted to develop more detailed insights with stakeholders in the industry. These included Bay-area real estate entrepreneurs, property managers, and young professional renters in urban cities that helped inform the hypothesis.
By having users fill out a standardized application form ahead of time, it saves users from repeating tedious administrative work, expedited the approvals process, and increasing the quality of applicant for landlords — ultimately improving the experience on both ends of the marketplace.
This Instant Apply feature already exists on Zumper‘s platform — but does not provide first-time renters or users who simply may have missed this section with enough context to understand the benefit of the solution.
Redesign focus on “Instant Apply”
Instant Apply has the potential to reduce redudancies across the process and improve the experience for both renters and landlords
Zumper is currently testing out two variations of its homepage. We can see in the second option, the “instant apply” feature is accented with a lightning sign and differentiated color. While in the first/current version, it is hidden in the drop-down menu.
This highlights Zumper’s recognition of the instant-apply feature of having strategic importance to boost value in the marketplace for both landlords and renters.
Redesign solutions:
- Integrate instant-apply within search results
- Add instant-apply symbol as a filter tool
- Present instant-apply in context as a tooltip when the user is searching
- Improve marketing + feature prioritization on the instant-apply page
Design approach
To develop solutions that had the potential for real business impact, (being a product designer with a very limited window of time & context into the company), I focused on identifying solutions that did not reinvent the wheel but improved an existing foundation. By focusing on the existing underlying foundation, I reduce the chances of developing risky ideas that could do more harm than good. In examining the user flow, I help unravel the pain points of the wider rental experience and needs of both rental seekers and landlords.
Redesign solutions
1. Listings Page
2. Listings Page + Instant Apply Tooltip
3. Instant Apply Page
User flow video
Looking forward — Integrate and Expedite
As Zumper continues to grow and innovate — I believe its true offering will squarely focus on integrating and expediting across rental search + approvals + payments process all under one roof.
While major apartment listing players offer search volume and standalone fixes, Zumper’s focus to address pain points, improve search volume, and integrate holistically will be its ultimate tool to create a better user experience for the rental marketplace.
Breakthrough Insight — Tenant reference data is not centralized
While credit checks and apartment applications are currently integrated into the instant application process, there is one missing area: tenant reference history.
As I spoke with experts — I realized tenant referencing is not centralized in a database like credit history or criminal records. Landlords and managers still need to personally verify potential tenants with a phone call to the past landlord. This is a burdensome process reliant on human factors, while in fact, it could potentially be automated like credit checks. While I’m aware of the many privacy concerns, and laws that may prevent this area from centralizing, I found this specific insight to be of value for further investigation.
Measuring results
Conduct tests whether
Conclusion — don’t doubt the power of simplicity
How do you go from having a limited context into the apartment rentals market to the proposal of a redesign solution? I found that pairing great secondary research, followed by primary research that involves asking questions to experts help zoom into the most valuable insights.
While the proposed solution rests on many assumptions gained from lean user and market research, it focuses on answering a central hypothesis to improve the rental experience in a measurable way.
Within consideration were parameters of practicality surrounding viability and feasibility of implementation. It was critical that my solution was tight in focus given the complexity of this platform.
When I settled on the solution — I questioned myself wondering if a solution could be this simple. It definitely can be (and should be). In reflection through my years working in marketing and now in UX design — simplicity is being able to boil down complexity into something that actually works.
If I had all the time in the world (we really never really do), I would have liked to conduct usability tests to vet this solution, iterate further, and eventually pilot this redesign out to a limited window of users. I’d like to see if there is a material change in adoption, lead generation, and conversion metrics and whether the hypothesis works.
Major learning of this redesign?
Like Craigslist...
Great design is not just aesthetics, but timeless simplicity
Thanks for reading and learning with me on my design journey. I’d love to hear your feedback, comments, and the opportunity to connect with fellow designers.
— Gordon Ching
