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Apartment listing site

Group E: Rune, Alex, Molmol

--General concept

Looking for an apartment in New York City can be a trying experience. Especially for those who aren’t familiar with the frenetic pace of real estate in this city. Our site aims to get users who live in a particular neighborhood to comment on a specific listing and rate it. By getting information from community members, users can make more informed decisions about neighborhoods and apartments in NYC.

--Design

We discussed at the first meeting that we want to keep a minimum design for our user interface. We picked two neighborhoods, Park Slope and Bushwick, in our second meeting. Alex has connection with the community board of Park Slope, and we think Bushwick has very verbal and outspoken crowd. We designed a basic layout of the commenting page on our third meeting.

The site is going to be designed with a map of the listing on the top, a comment box under it, and then the list of comments. As we try to guide the conversation towards comment on the listing, we chose to put the comment box at the top. It will be possible for users to reply to other user’s comments, which is to be used if a user disagrees with another user. Users do not need to log in to comment on the site.

A user can flag his comment a green, yellow or red color, depending on his take on the featured listing and price. This gives the visitors a chance to quickly skim the site and see the general opinion towards the listing. The color rating will also prove as a sorting criteria.

See bottom of document for pencil mock-up.

--User interaction

We want to keep the requirements of the user to a minimum. The interface will have only one required element: a comment text. Optional design elements include inputting the address where you live, and rating the listing on a color scale (red, yellow, green).

We have a series of important cues for the user, the most important one being the use of colors to style the comments.

Required:

    * Comment body

Optional

    * Pin address/location on a map or enter address
    * Color rating

Cues

    * Stoplight colored rating system as comment background
    * Map - neighborhood feedback-centric

Technical Specification

We are building the site using Ruby on Rails and Javascript.

Mock-up