User research, UI design, UX design, branding
Product designer (sole designer on team)
June 2018 - January 2021
The real estate experience in Japan can be a frustrating process to navigate for incoming foreigners, a growing problem in recent years as the inflow of foreign workers has grown to meet rising demands. Stepping into a physical real estate agency is still the main way to find housing, which is a struggle for anyone who is not fluent in the Japanese language, and while there are plenty of short-term rentals offered in non-Japanese languages, there are few international websites that serve the mid-to-long-term (1+ years) rental market. Private landlords and property managers who are open to the idea of renting to foreigners also lack the means to reach the market, due to language and cultural barriers.
As the sole designer on the project, I was in charge of designing the user experience and the visuals for the overall service. I also contributed to user research and persona development, and assisted in planning new features for the platform.
I worked alongside a remote team of 4 developers to bring the designs to life, as well as the 2 co-founders working in Japan to expand the business and plan new features. Due to the small size of the team and the time difference between the design/planning team, we had to closely coordinate the design process and the development process to make sure that everyone was on the same page at all times.
The overall goal of the startup was to create a multi-lingual real estate platform for foreign tenants in Japan, and reduce the barrier of entry into the Japanese rental market.
Japanese rentals tend to have a large amount of fees, unique fixtures and amenities, and the room layout is described in terms of "LDK" (living, dining, kitchen) rather than bedroom count, which can all be overwhelming to an unfamiliar foreign tenant. In addition, the rental market is traditionally wary against renting to foreign tenants due to a difference in culture; landlords and managers who would be willing to rent to foreign tenants receive little support to reach the foreign market due to language and cultural barriers.
To alleviate these problems, the platform needed to provide a searchable database of properties listing information in a way that would still be easy to understand for foreign tenants, and allow for property uploading and contact in a way that required little-to-no foreign language skills for the property owners and managers.
Each of us working at the startup in Japan had a negative experience moving here as a foreigner or half-Japanese, due to not understanding the rental system or how to search for affordable properties. We wanted to collect other user experiences from foreigners who had moved to Japan, to see if there were any common complaints about the process. We also wanted to hear from estate agents and property managers on the other side, to see if it was really "cultural differences" that made it so difficult to rent to foreign tenants.
We started off doing some user research on both tenant and landlord sides to identify main issues with the current rental system. Additionally, we looked at some major rental platforms in Japan and compared their features to western rental platforms such as Trulia or Zumper, to see where those experiences differed.
We conducted in-person interviews and online surveys to learn about the experiences of foreign tenants who had moved to Japan, and estate agents/landlords who were open to the idea of renting to foreigners. We were able to identify common roadblocks for foreigners looking for rentals, as well as anxieties that estate agents and landlords may have when renting to a foreign tenant.
We looked at major rental platforms in Japan and compared their features to western rental platforms such as Trulia, Zumper, or Craigslist, to see where those experiences differed. We also looked through blogs and reviews about the real estate experience in Japan from the perspective of a tenant, which allowed us to identify pain points in the process.
We identified some common challenges for both tenants and estate agents/landlords:
Through user interviews with individual estate agents and housing groups around Tokyo, we found that many estate agents were actually happy to rent to foreign tenants, but had no idea how to reach those demographics due to the language barrier. Many rental properties were simply not available to foreign tenants due to the lack of resources to post advertisements in other languages, rather than discrimination due to race or nationality.
We also took a look at the main services in Japan offering real estate services for foreign tenants.
Many rental properties were simply not available to foreign tenants due to the lack of resources to post advertisements in other languages, rather than discrimination due to race or nationality.
We were able to identify a large gap in the long-term rental market. High-end services tailored towards wealthy expats tended to come with proper English support, but cheaper housing tended to only be listed on services such as Craigslist or Jimoty, which requires a high level of Japanese to navigate. Other websites like UR Housing only provided a small selection of properties, often in areas far away from popular commute destinations.
There were already services on the market for cheap short-term rentals (students, working holiday visa holders) and luxury long-term rentals (wealthy expatriates), so we decided to narrow our initial target audience to young professionals looking for low-to-mid priced properties.
Based on this initial target, we were able to create two user personas to base our initial designs off of.
Using these user personas, we created a user journey map for the process of moving to Japan and finding a rental property. We identified various pain points in the process based off the user interviews we conducted, and were able to identify potential improvements for each step in the process.
From these user personas and the user journey map, we were able to identify the required features for the MVP release.
In the early stages of the platform, we had already created mid-fidelity designs and user flows for core features such as house profiles and property search, so it was mainly a matter of improving the design and site flow to reduce any friction for the end user.
To begin with, I created a design system based off of atomic principles to ensure a consistent user experience across the platform. To ensure the designs would work equally well on desktop and mobile, I focused on making responsive components that would resize well to small and large phone screens. I used an 8px grid as a basis for the design, and a 4px baseline grid for text, to make sure the visual rhythm stayed consistent between pages.
Ensuring that the website would display properly in multiple languages was one of the main challenges. Since Japanese is a much more information-dense language than English, I had to account for long English descriptions as well as short Japanese ones. We decided on Noto Sans for our main font, because we wanted to ensure that the website would display properly for as many languages as possible.
Alongside the design system, I helped to develop visual aspects of the branding.
We explored both younger-feeling, "pop" designs, as well as more "sophisticated" designs relying on typography and photos, as we refined our target demographic and services we offered.
We settled on a "pop" aesthetic for the top page of the platform, to appeal to younger tenants, and focused on a slightly more mature feeling design for the banner ads because they were mainly aimed towards attracting estate agents to use the service.
For the MVP phase, we decided to focus mainly on the discovery aspect of property hunting, and decided to leave the connection step to a later phase. The main points of interaction for the tenant were the search results page and the house profile pages, so that was where I focused the majority of my time.
The main challenge was to figure out how to organize the information in a way that is understandable to tenants from a variety of cultural backgrounds, while sticking to the same format and terms that estate agents use to advertise properties in Japanese. I referenced western rental platforms a lot during this step, drawing on familiar UI patterns from rental websites such as Zumper, as well as vacation websites such as Airbnb.
Instead of localizing the LDK system and other Japanese-specific terms to be more understandable to a global audience, I chose to translate the terms as close as possible, using icons and tooltips to provide additional context to the terms.
I chose this method because most terms in Japanese tend to be used loosely, rather than having a strict legal definition. For example, an apartment with a sliding door in the living room area could be described as a 1LDK (1-bedroom with large living room) or a 2DK (2-bedroom with small dining room) depending on how the estate agent chooses to advertise the property.
Since we wanted to allow estate agents to upload and manage their own properties in Japanese, a direct translation would avoid any potential issues.
Since we imagined our initial target user to be a person who may not speak much Japanese, I included large photos at the top of the property profile as well as details about the surroundings and options for 360 degree and VR views of the housing, so that the tenant would be able to get a good idea of how the property looks before scheduling a potential house visit in person, saving them time and reducing the amount of interaction they'd need to do in Japanese.
We also introduced a large number of commonly-used tags for fixtures and amenities, based off our research on Japanese websites and physical real estate listings. This was to ensure that estate agents listed the properties in an easily translatable format. Each tag comes with its own matching icon, to further reinforce the meaning for potentially unfamiliar terms.
On the search screen, I chose to use a split-screen view with house cards and a large map, presenting only the most relevant information on the house cards.
Japanese websites tend to display a large amount of information upfront with minimal photos, and assume that the tenant already has an area or a specific train line in mind before even initiating the search.
We chose to implement a map-based search method instead, allowing the tenant to get a visual sense of where properties are located in relation to the nearest train station and their commute destination. We also implemented drag-and-drop search, which updated the house cards dynamically according to what was visible in the viewport, allowing the tenant to further narrow down properties according to location.
We chose to keep the cards simple to make the search process less overwhelming for the tenant, choosing to only display the monthly rent, property layout, size, and distance from the station. On the house cards, we also included tags for specific features, such as 360 degree photos which would make it easier to decide on properties without having to be present for an in-person viewing.
We chose to design for Japanese estate agents as our initial target user on the supply side, because of their access to a wide variety of real estate listings. We had found that many estate agents were open to the idea of taking foreign clients, and just needed an effective way to advertise to those clients.
With that in mind, we tried to keep the uploading system as close to other Japanese real estate websites as possible, to make the transition easy. The biggest challenge here was creating all of the variations for the different types of properties out there, and styling the form into digestible chunks so that the information wasn't overwhelming to look at.
Alongside house adding, we also provided printable PDFs of each property to make the service more attractive to estate agents who prefer to pull out properties in a large binder or send property details via e-mail attachment. This service was a hit with one of our partnering estate agent offices, who used the brochures to quickly show property details on an iPad during viewings or open houses.
We presented the MVP at Digital Garage's Demo Day in January 2019, and continued to develop new features throughout 2020. We partnered with local estate agencies to gather properties, and had around 300 hand-listed properties on the platform by mid-2020. We were also in discussion with local guarantor and utilities companies to provide their services through the platform, reducing the need for potential tenants to purchase those services separately.
Unfortunately, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the startup was forced to pause operations in early 2021, due to the lack of foreign tenants coming into Japan and the decline in the real estate market. However, once tenants start to come back in, the startup plans to continue development on new features and start reaching out to estate agents once again.
Although the startup is currently on pause, I learned a great deal about design systems and designing for large-scale platforms throughout my time working with the team.
Taking the initial time to sit down and define each aspect of the design with the developers made it easy to create designs that were feasible within the limitations of the framework we were using, and having a library of reusable assets not only reduced my working time later on, but also made it possible for other members of the team to create quick mockups in Figma without needing much of my assistance.
I also learned how to balance the needs of the business alongside the needs of the users, and acted as an in-between for the developers and the founders, who were focused on generating new ideas and business strategies.
I learned to advocate for the developers and find out what was feasible to implement within the timeframe, as well as set a priority order for features and plan on a large scale of time. However, I also gained a lot of experience in advocating for the user's needs to the developers, and learned how to explain the reasons behind my design choices and why they mattered for the end user.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
qiuning.huang@gmail.com
