Exec­u­tive Summary

Overview

Keyzz​.com will be a web appli­ca­tion to find and list short term rentals, as well as man­age the book­ing and main­te­nance of any prop­er­ties that are rented on a short term basis. Ini­tially the web­site will be avail­able for own­ers or man­agers of prop­er­ties located in Amsterdam.

My goal is to develop a user cen­tered inter­face that is as sim­ple and intu­itive as pos­si­ble. The design’s visual and copy will be affir­ma­tive and engag­ing in order to make the user feel con­fi­dent and com­fort­able with the ser­vice being provided.

The users who are look­ing to rent one of this prop­er­ties will be able to search for dif­fer­ent kinds of accom­mo­da­tions in Ams­ter­dam includ­ing apart­ments, stu­dios, house­boats, and guest houses. Amongst other things, they will be able to check the spe­cific fea­tures of each accom­mo­da­tion as well as its avail­abil­ity. They will be able to write reviews and include images or videos in those reviews.

Prop­erty own­ers and/or man­agers will have at their dis­posal a vari­ety of tools includ­ing the abil­ity to auto­mat­i­cally list their prop­er­ties in dif­fer­ent estab­lished list­ing web­sites such as Craigslist and Oodle. They will also have a mobile app where they can man­age new and exist­ing book­ings as well as cre­ate new main­te­nance issues and email pic­tures of main­te­nance prob­lems directly to their favorite main­te­nance ser­vice providers.

The back end struc­ture of the appli­ca­tion will allow future expan­sion to other cities and the cre­ation of other front end designs that can use the same database.

I intend to have the web appli­ca­tion live as well as a work­ing pro­to­type of the mobile appli­ca­tion by the end of the MFA pro­gram at the Acad­emy of Art Uni­ver­sity in the Fall of 2011.

Ini­tial Concepts

VRBO

VRBO stands for Vaca­tion Rental By Owner and it is a com­mon acronym used when refer­ring to prop­er­ties that can be rented for short peri­ods of time. Many times these prop­er­ties are not man­aged by their owner but by prop­erty man­agers. How­ever they are always cozily fur­nished which gives them a warm and homely feel­ing, as opposed to the corporate-like and cold expe­ri­ence that one usu­ally have when stay­ing at a hotel.

Vaca­tion rentals have an advan­tage over hotels if the traveler’s pri­or­i­ties are pri­vacy and cost per guest. It is spe­cially advan­ta­geous if the renter has an spe­cific neigh­bor­hood in mind.

Ams­ter­dam

Ams­ter­dam is one of the biggest trav­el­ing des­ti­na­tions in Europe and it attracts peo­ple of all ages and back­grounds. The hotel infra­struc­ture in the City Cen­tre is very lim­ited and the vaca­tion rental indus­try has devel­oped to sup­ply the demand for short term accom­mo­da­tions. The city was cho­sen as the start point for Keyzz​.com because of its lib­eral and sophis­ti­cated aura as well as its friend­li­ness towards the P2P ideology.

The web­site will focus on Ams­ter­dam at first but even­tu­ally it will be scaled up to enclose other cities, pos­si­bly San Francisco.

Peer to Peer (P2P)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that orig­i­nated from the pop­u­lar con­cept of peer-to-peer com­puter appli­ca­tion design, pop­u­lar­ized by the large dis­trib­uted file shar­ing sys­tems, such as Nap­ster, the first of its kind in the late 1990’s. The con­cept has inspired new struc­tures and philoso­phies in other areas of human inter­ac­tion. In this con­text it refers to the meme of egal­i­tar­ian social net­work­ing that is cur­rently emerg­ing through­out soci­ety, enabled by Inter­net technologies.

Tourist ver­sus Traveller

Whether you travel across the world, or to a part of a city that you never have vis­ited before, there’s some­thing impor­tant and mag­i­cal about find­ing new sit­u­a­tions and see­ing new sights. While travel is often an obser­va­tional expe­ri­ence, many trav­el­ers specif­i­cally travel to par­tic­i­pate in the action.

There’s def­i­nitely a dif­fer­ence between trav­el­ing and tour­ing. The for­mer requires an authen­tic inter­est in new things and an open­ness and will­ing­ness to expe­ri­ence them. The lat­ter is usu­ally lim­ited to “see­ing” the sights — often through the lens of a photo or video cam­era. Tourists tend to grav­i­tate to the famil­iar for meals and com­pan­ion­ship while trav­el­ers abhor both, instead going out of their way to meet new people.

Tar­get Audience

There are two pri­mary tar­get audiences:

• Prop­erty Managers
• VRBO Users

Prop­erty man­agers can be:

Prop­erty own­ers of one or more prop­er­ties who want to rent them out for short peri­ods of time and need an online venue to adver­tise the prop­er­ties’ avail­abil­ity and fea­tures, as well as man­age­ment tools. Prop­erty own­ers usu­ally man­age no more than 3 or 4 properties.

Pro­fes­sional prop­erty man­agers of short term rental accom­mo­da­tions who need a venue online to adver­tise the uni­ties’ fea­tures as well as effi­cient man­age­ment tools. Pro­fes­sional prop­erty man­agers can man­age many prop­er­ties at the same time.

VRBO users can be:

Pro­fes­sion­als trav­el­ing on busi­ness who need a place to stay for short peri­ods of time and con­sider value, pri­vacy, and loca­tion impor­tant req­ui­sites when mak­ing a deci­sion about where to stay.

Stu­dents or group of stu­dents from out of town who need a place to stay for short peri­ods of time and con­sider value and loca­tion impor­tant req­ui­sites when mak­ing a deci­sion about where to stay.

Tourists and trav­el­ers look­ing for enter­tain­ment and in need of a place to stay on a short term basis who con­sider pri­vacy, safety, and value impor­tant require­ments on an accom­mo­da­tion. Trav­el­ers are tourists who are inter­ested in more than just enter­tain­ment. They are seek­ing the whole expe­ri­ence of stay­ing at a real home in the city where they are vis­it­ing. This group is the pri­mary tar­get audi­ence and they con­sider pri­vacy, safety, and loca­tion impor­tant require­ments when mak­ing a deci­sion about where to stay.

User Cen­tered Design Process Status

Require­ments Analysis

Most of the Require­ment Analy­sis is done but need small adjustments.

Func­tional Analy­sis and Specification

User needs is almost com­plete but need small adjust­ments. There are three crit­i­cal usage sce­nar­ios ready but a few oth­ers need to be devel­oped. There are no task analy­sis done.

Con­cep­tual

There are a few mind maps done includ­ing the first draft of a site map. I intend to use these mind maps to help on the design of the final infor­ma­tion architecture.

Nav­i­ga­tion & Input/Output Mechanisms

Is not done and I have not started it yet.

Wire­frames

The first draft of the wire­frames for three user case sce­nar­ios were done for the mid­point pre­sen­ta­tion but they have to be improved and more wire­frames need to be done.

Mockups/Prototypes

There are no mock­ups or pro­to­types done.

Usabil­ity Testing

No form of usabil­ity test­ing was con­ducted so far other than the mid­point review where the pro­posal for this project was pre­sented and approved.

User Cen­tered Design Process Goals

I intend to develop the fol­low­ing deliv­er­ables by the end of this group directed study:

• Tar­get audi­ence: personas
• Fea­ture list & con­tent inventory
• Sce­nar­ios & task inventory
• Dataflow dia­grams
• Task analy­sis
• Infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture includ­ing out­lines and wireframes.

My main goal is to have a work­ing pro­to­type con­tain­ing as many of the crit­i­cal user sce­nar­ios as pos­si­ble. That way I can con­duct heuris­tic eval­u­a­tions and user test­ings in order to refine and improve the over­all appli­ca­tion. After that I intend to use the result­ing wire­frames to refine the visual design (not in this directed study) and con­duct more user tests until the project is ready to be coded.

Class

• Dis­cus­sion: Require­ments Analysis
• User per­sonas

Feed­back

• When writ­ing a doc­u­ment for usabil­ity pur­poses, always orga­nize your thought in bul­let points rather than in prose. That way who­ever reads it will be able to scan it faster and more efficiently.

Due Next Week

• Require­ments Analy­sis Report