Home swapping with Tauschwohnung - A unique way to find a new home
Project Overview
Tauschwohnung is an innovative platform that empowers individuals to seamlessly exchange their homes on a permanent basis. By facilitating these mutually beneficial living space swaps, the website offers an exciting alternative to the traditional real estate market of home sales and rentals.
The platform's founder sought strategic enhancements to the website to improve the website’s performance, expand its user base, and boost overall traffic.
PLATFORM
Web & Mobile
TEAM
Senior UX Designer
Developers
Stakeholders
MY ROLE
UX/UI Designer
Problem Statement
Tauschwohnung offers a unique solution for permanent home exchanges, but its potential is hindered by several usability and trust barriers. The current platform lacks of guidance of the swapping process that frustrates users and leads to high drop-off rates. While the concept is solid, the execution feels outdated—navigation and messaging could handle some improvement, the matching system lacks precision, and the interface design doesn’t inspire confidence. Additionally, the absence of strong trust signals, such as verified profiles or success stories, makes users hesitant to commit to long-term swaps.
Goal
To address these challenges, this redesign focuses on adding more guidance on the landing page, enhancing credibility with verified profiles and success stories, implementing an elevated search field, and modernizing the user interface for better usability. By removing these barriers, we aim to transform Tauschwohnung into a more accessible and trustworthy service that facilitates successful long-term home swaps while growing its user base.
Design Process
Research
We conducted comprehensive research, starting with a thorough competitive analysis. This laid the groundwork for the next phase - in-depth interviews with 20 existing Tauschwohnung users, mainly female participants across various age groups.
Through these conversations, we tried to better understand users' perceptions of the real estate market, their familiarity with Tauschwohnung, and their overall thoughts about the concept of home exchanges.
Encouragingly, the majority of users responded positively to the Tauschwohnung platform, appreciating the unique value it provides. However, the interviews also pointed out us some problems, such as lack of guidence on the website, missing images on advertisements, no reply on messages and issues with the mobile version of the website.
User Personas
With insights gathered from the survey and interviews, we developed three personas to represent the primary user groups.
Wireframes
After analyzing the user feedback gathered for the platform, we began the process of redesigning a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. In doing so, we placed a strong emphasis on addressing the primary pain points identified by our users, including:
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Unclear exchange process and workflow --> How it works' section and FAQ on the landing page
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Incomplete or unclear property listings --> Guidance with examples and required fields while adding property
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Ineffective communication through messages --> More user-friendly UI for the Messages page
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Limited search and matching capabilities --> Elevated search field with more customization
Tablet - landscape
Mobile
Desktop
Wireframes for native app
