Apartment Searching made Easier

SIMS 2006 Masters Final ProjectMelissa Chan, Irina Lib, Kavita Mittal, Sarah Poon

Adviser: Marti Hearst

Motivation

Profile Apartment Hunters

Survey

Characterize User Needs

Survey

Personas

Assign Priorities to Common Tasks

Survey

Personas

TaskAnalysis

Task Priority

Specify…

High

Explore the Competition

Survey

Personas

TaskAnalysis

Task Priority

Specify…

High

CompetitiveEvaluation

HousingMaps

Apartments.com

Low-Fidelity Prototype

Suggested Area Needs Assessment

Suggested Area Needs Assessment Results

Data Sources

HomeSkim

Craigslist

Data Sources

Yahoo Local

Google Maps - Driving Times & Distances

System Architecture

MySQL

Parsing engine (PHP/Perl)

Query Engine (PHP)

User Interface

AJAX Engine

JavaScript HTML + CSS

Craigslist

RSS feed (batch)

Transit info

Query Params HTTP GET

Apache Web Server

Client Web Browser

Result (XML)

Local BusinessSearch

Parsed Data

GeoodingService

Driving Directions

Design Iterations

26 miles 35 minutes20 miles 27 minutes

Future Directions

• Enhancements– Increase geographic scope

– Add data for neighborhood safety, school district

• Additional Applications– Can be easily extended to other scenarios:

• Finding convenient meeting spots(central to geographically dispersed people)

• Extension to other kinds of listings (car sales etc)

– Adapt to a cell phone application• Use GPS to find available apartments/homes in the area