Apartments.com

Schedule a Tour

The global pandemic of 2020 forced the world to change in fundamental ways. We had to get creative to meet the needs of people looking for homes who couldn’t always tour a rental in person. We suddenly went from one tour type to 3: in-person, self-guided, and online.

Problems to Solve

We have lots of ways to tour, but our users:
- Don’t know what we offer, and
- Don’t have an easy or centralized way to schedule
Property management companies are overwhelmed with calls and emails from prospective tenants, and they need a way to separate out tour requests, which are considered a “high quality” lead

Research

Competitive Analysis

Early in the concepting phase, my team and I pulled tons of examples of how other sites and products have designed flows for complex onboarding and checkout processes. Of course we looked at competitors in our industry, but we also looked at apps like ZocDoc, Turbo Tax, Carvana, and Airbnb.

Userflow

What actions does a renter want to take from a listing detail page?

In an earlier iteration of this concept, we considered consolidating all of these actions into a single lead form, but after some early user testing and discussions with leadership, we ultimately decided an A/B experiment on the live site with the schedule tour flow separated out into its own flow made more sense. If it performs well, we can consider combining it with the lead form in a later sprint.

Early MVP Wireframes

We went back and forth a few times about how we could simplify a true MVP concept. This one suggested that we launch a “mini” schedule tour flow from a secondary CTA on the lead form.