| Title | Instructions | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Creating an Account and Changing a Profile Attribute | (1) After opening Dam Good Housing, click “Register Here” and register an account. (2) Upon completion, log into this new account. (3) Click on your profile to edit an attribute. (4) Edit an attribute of your choice. |
This task checks whether a new user can easily register, log in, and find where to update their profile. These steps are important because they show whether our onboarding flow is clear and whether users understand how to access and edit personal information. Completing this task also sets up the logged-in state needed for later tasks. |
| 2. Posting a Listing | (1) Click “+ Create Listing” on the home page to be prompted by a new posting widget. (2) Fill out the prompts with the desired information and add a few amenities. (3) Create the listing. |
Posting a listing is one of the main features of our app, so we want to see if users know how to start a listing, fill out the form, choose amenities, and submit it. Watching this process helps us understand whether the posting widget is intuitive, whether our form fields make sense, and whether users get enough feedback while creating a listing. |
| 3. Posting as a Roommate | (1) Click “+ Create New Posting” on the Roommate page to be prompted by a new posting widget. (2) Fill out the prompts with the desired information. (3) Create the posting. |
This task tests a similar workflow to creating a housing listing, but within the roommate section. It helps us see whether users understand the difference between the two types of posts, whether the navigation between them is clear, and whether the roommate form is easy to complete. It also shows how well users can apply patterns from the listing task to a slightly different scenario. |
| 4. Editing a Created Post | (1) Navigate to the “My Postings” page. (2) Choose either a Listing or Roommate Posting to edit. (3) Edit the post or listing and save the changes. |
Editing a post shows whether users know where their past postings are stored and how to update them. This task tests the clarity of the “My Postings” page, the visibility of edit options, and whether saving changes feels straightforward. It also helps us understand if users feel confident managing their own content. |
| 5. Browsing for Housing | (1) Browse for a desired listing. (2) Filter the listing outputs to preferences. (3) View details to see more information about a listing. (4) Favorite your preferred listings. |
This task looks at how well users can explore available housing. It tests whether the listing cards are easy to read, whether the filters make sense, and whether users can figure out how to view more details. Favoriting a listing shows whether users understand how to save posts they like and whether the interface clearly signals success. |
| 6. Browsing for a Roommate | (1) Browse for a desired roommate. (2) Filter the roommate outputs to preferences. (3) View details to see more information about a roommate. (4) Favorite your preferred roommate. |
Browsing for a roommate is similar to browsing for a listing, but the information users care about is different. This task checks whether the roommate browsing page, filters, and detail views are clear. It also shows whether the experience feels consistent with the listing-browsing experience and whether saving potential roommates is easy to understand. |
| 7. Sending Interest to a Favorited Housing Post | (1) Go to your favorites and find the housing option you are most interested in and contact the lister. | Messaging a lister is one of the most important actions a user can take. This task checks whether users can find their favorites, choose a listing they want to pursue, and successfully contact the poster. It helps us see whether the messaging button is easy to find, whether the flow makes sense, and whether users get clear confirmation that their message was sent. |
Overall, Fiora was successful during her user testing but had constructive feedback across the app’s concepts. For the tasks focused on housing, Fiora filled out the listing form without any issues, until the amenities portion. She’d expected to be provided tags to choose from and even verbally clarified that there were no tags and she had to add her own amenities. Then, she wrote “close to z [center]” in the amenity field and left the miles field blank, instead of specifying “Z center” and a miles amount because the idea of amenities (even with the example fill-ins for each field) wasn’t clear enough. Furthermore, while Fiora later mentioned posting as a highlight of the app, her housing listing didn’t show up the first nor second time that she tried. Finally, she edited, favorited, and contacted listings without issues, and expressed that she liked the map view function to see pins for each housing option.
When dealing with roommates, Fiora ran into confusion over the app’s purpose. She asked questions like, “Is this info about me or you [the desired roommate]?,” regarding the roommate posting form fields. She also didn’t understand why she saw roommate postings for Amsterdam after having made one for Cambridge, thinking that every user looking for roommates would make their own posting. Eventually, she realized that the workflow was for a user to browse the existing postings and then only make their own if they couldn’t find one that matched, after which she showed appreciation for the idea behind the roommate page. Furthermore, when thinking about the separation between the housing and roommate concepts, she conceded that there are many different user workflows, so our app has no one-size-fits-all. Later, Fiora recommended that it would be important for roommate postings to specify if they already had housing or not, and she also suggested that roommates should be able to specify dates in their postings.
Finally, regarding the notification concept, Fiora successfully received a confirmation email upon registering, but then wasn’t satisfied with the capability to express interest in a housing listing. She asked, “Send interest? That’s it? What does that mean?” because our UI doesn’t provide users with any additional context about what messaging entails.
Ultimately, Fiora navigated the app smoothly and was able to follow each task, but she also revealed potential areas for improvement.
Belise had a positive experience during her user testing, describing the app as cute, intuitive, useful, and fitting for MIT’s vibe, and only ran into a few hiccups. To start, she didn’t initially realize that she had to navigate to the registration page to create an account, and instead tried to sign in directly from the login page with a newly-created username and password. However, upon figuring out the registration page, she remarked, “That was easy!” on the convenience of the process. Once logged in, she had a positive reaction to the website’s layout and theme, and easily navigated to and edited her profile details.
Then, while making her posting, Belise worked quickly and easily. She appreciated the autopopulation of the address, and added a nearby food spot that she felt was important to the attractiveness of her housing location. While she was initially confused on the “miles” form field, she quickly realized the optionality, and then expressed excitement on seeing her post auto-populate on the listings page. Belise had a similar experience creating a roommate posting. It took her a bit longer to fill out the fields because she was thinking thoroughly about her responses to each, and was a bit surprised at the daily rhythm dropdown. Finally, to edit her post, she ran into no trouble but worked directly from the Housing page, rather than the My Postings page (which was not specified either way but is something to consider our preference on).
When working with filtering, Belise initially expressed confusion about why there would be a filter for Min Price, but then understood the given explanation about searching for more high-end or attractive properties. Furthermore, after clicking on a post and immediately finding ‘Contact Me’, she expressed excitement at the functional emailing concept.
Finally, Belise’s only other concern was on the safety aspect of Roommates because it would be on users to ensure the validity and fit of the poster, and she mentioned that using Touchstone would feel safer for MIT students but exclude non-MIT students.
Follow these summaries up by listing 3–5 flaws or opportunities for improvement. Each should describe what the flaw or opportunity is, explain why it is currently occurring, and suggest one or more ways in which it might be addressed.
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Amenities section of housing listings form The amenities section is currently confusing for housing posters to fill out because it combines many different features of a listing into one section. Amenities encompasses things like on-site laundry and wifi, but also nearby T-stops and grocery stores — and has an optional form field for “miles.” To improve clarity, the amenities section could be divided into two separate sections, called amenities (features of the housing itself) and location benefits (places that the housing is close to, with mile amounts). Additionally, the amenities section could provide default tags, and the location benefits section could provide default dropdown options, so that the user doesn’t have to come up with ideas entirely on their own.
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Separation of posting vs. browsing workflows The separation between creating vs. browsing for housing listings and roommate posts is a bit unclear because both actions are done from the same page. Moreover, the large + buttons at the top of each page makes it seem like the default to create a listing or posting, whereas this is not the typical workflow for most users; in other words, there’s no clarification about who should be creating a housing listing or roommate post. Thus, one option is to make the + buttons smaller and add specifying text or a help button that better explains the app’s purpose and expected workflow. On the other hand, it may be best to change the app structure so that users only create posts from the My Postings page and only browse others’ posts from the Housing and Roommates pages, separating the two actions completely.
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Messaging housing listers/roommate posters dissatisfaction Currently, expressing interest in housing and contacting roommates leaves users dissatisfied because they have no insight into what pressing those buttons on a post entails and cannot customize their message with additional information. To address this flaw, we could change both the “Send Interest” and “Contact Me” buttons into buttons titled “Click to send a message,” which would result in a pop-up form. The form would be autopopulated with information from the user’s profile, as well as would have a text box for users to add a more detailed, customizable message for the lister or roommate, sharing more about themselves or their situation. Finally, after submitting the form, we could send users a confirmation email with documentation of the message that they sent.
Based on insights from both user tests, we implemented the following design improvements:
- Updated sorting so that most recent posts appear at the top of the feed.
This ensures users immediately see their newly created post and receive clear confirmation that their action was successful.
- Added instructions to the amenities section to clarify its purpose and how it should be used.
This directly addresses confusion about what types of information belong in this field.
- Added “Number of Roommates Looking For” to clarify expectations.
- Age and gender now auto-populate in the roommate posting form, while still allowing users to edit these values.
- Separated “What you are looking for” from “Tell us about yourself” to reduce redundancy and improve clarity.
- Added a housing status tag for roommate posters so users can see whether a person already has housing.
These changes improve user understanding of who the form is describing and what stage of the housing process a roommate is in.
- Added a favorite button to the listing detail (“About”) page so users can save posts while viewing more information.
- Standardized the filled and unfilled heart icons and increased their size to improve visibility and consistency.
- Changed the filtering UI and added location-based filtering for housing, allowing users to better narrow results based on geographic preferences.