Zee The Future ⚡

Framing the Problem

House hunting is often tedious, overwhelming, and impersonal. Scrolling through endless listings, managing preferences, and making decisions can be overwhelming, while homeowners lack visibility into potential buyers’ interest in their property.

By gamifying the property search, we can make it fun, interactive, and rewarding, leading to better engagement, faster decisions, and a more enjoyable experience.

Idea Explanation

During the ideation process, our first step was to define the problem. We identified three major issues from the brief provided:

1. House hunting is often tedious, overwhelming, and impersonal.

2. Homeowners lack visibility into potential buyers’ interest in their property.

3. House searches are neither interactive nor enjoyable.

To address these challenges, we developed tailored solutions that align with Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, ensuring a seamless, intuitive, and engaging experience.

1. AI Personalisation to Enhance the House Search Experience

   We created "Zee The Future," (See the future, get it?). An AI-powered storytelling feature that transforms the house search into an immersive, time-travel experience. This feature allows users to visualise potential future scenarios for a property based on AI-driven projections. This also includes the enhancement of the existing "My Home" feature on Zoopla for those who have already purchased properties with the company. 

   Zee The Future presents users with a dynamic, interactive journey through time. Imagine scrolling through a home listing and seeing animated insights: “The year is 2034… Your home has gained +20% in value.” “You've transformed the backyard into an entertainment space.” “Your neighbourhood has developed a thriving community hub.”

   Applying Nielsen's Visibility of System Status, Zee ensures that users receive real-time updates on property trends, buyer engagement, and market dynamics. By turning home searching into a personalised, immersive storytelling experience, Zee enhances decision-making, engagement, and excitement for buyers and sellers alike.

2. A Reward System for Leaving Reviews

   The idea is to add a gamification element that aligns with the initial brief. We created a daily check-in and reward system that encourages user participation by offering incentives for leaving property reviews. For this, we applied Nielsen's Recognition Rather than Recall – The system would present clear, easily accessible incentives, ensuring users don’t need to remember their past interactions to claim rewards.

   Users can track their progress through a dynamic rewards dashboard, where they can redeem points for tailored incentives such as priority property viewings, exclusive market insights, and personalised mortgage tips from realtors, making the search process both engaging and rewarding.

3. Fit Score Checker for Smarter Property Matches

   The concept behind this implementation is to create a smart filtering system that reduces endless scrolling by ranking properties based on users' preferences and past interactions. We applied Nielsen's Match Between System and the Real World – The Fit Score would provide users with a clear, understandable rating system, ensuring recommendations feel natural and relevant.

Implementation

We began by creating pictorial sketches to visually map out our ideas and refine our concepts. These initial sketches helped us establish the core structure and user flows.

Next, we transitioned to low-fidelity prototypes in Figma, allowing us to test basic layouts, navigation, and functionality. Once the structure was validated, we developed high-fidelity prototypes to showcase detailed UI elements, interactions, and seamless transitions between dashboards.

Challenges

During this challenge, we primarily faced difficulties in streamlining our ideas. Initially, we generated a lot of concepts, and it proved to be quite challenging to make them all fit together cohesively. We had to think about how to implement these ideas and ultimately categorised them into three groups: must-haves, important, and less important. We also took implementation into account. Our group was multi-talented and composed of very bright individuals, which made it somewhat challenging to sift through all that intelligence.

Accomplishments

One of our greatest accomplishments was successfully streamlining our core ideas—a challenge that initially proved difficult. Through this process, we learned that ideation isn’t just about generating numerous ideas, but about identifying a simple, effective, and implementable solution that enhances the overall user experience.

Next Steps

Our next steps focus on user testing, refinement, and preparation for development. We will conduct usability testing to gather feedback, refine UI/UX based on insights, and enhance key features like AI personalisation, the Fit Score algorithm, and gamification elements. We will also assess technical feasibility, collaborate with developers, and optimise integrations for features like 3D tours and AI-driven recommendations.

To bring this vision to life, we plan to use:

• React Native for cross-platform compatibility, ensuring a seamless experience across iOS and Android.

• Expo for rapid prototyping, testing, and deployment, allowing us to iterate efficiently.

• Machine Learning frameworks such as TensorFlow.js or an alternative to drive AI-based property recommendations.

• Three.js or Babylon.js for implementing immersive 3D home tours within the app.

Since we are not fully aware of the company’s existing authentication, geolocation, and backend services infrastructure, we aim to integrate seamlessly with their current tech stack. If needed, we suggest options like Firebase for authentication and real-time database functionality and Google Maps API for geolocation-based property searches and smart navigation, but we are open to adapting based on existing solutions.

Further improvements include expanding social engagement features, refining the reward system, and implementing a navigator to help potential buyers easily find properties that match their preferences. We have provided some future ideas below:

1. 3D Viewing Options for an Interactive Experience

   Concept: Enhancing the browsing experience with immersive 3D home tours, allowing users to explore properties remotely.

   Flexibility and Efficiency of Use – 3D tours cater to both novice and expert users, offering intuitive controls while reducing unnecessary physical visits.

2. Spotify-Style Wrap-Up for House Hunting

   This concept was implemented with the project brief in mind. The idea is to make Zoopla a fun and engaging app. This feature summarises user activity, preferences, and top properties viewed, helping them make data-driven decisions. For this, we applied Nielsen's Aesthetic and Minimalist Design – The wrap-up would present insights in a visually appealing and digestible format, preventing information overload.