Transcript Slides

Apartment Searching made Easier
SIMS 2006 Masters Final Project
Melissa Chan, Irina Lib, Kavita Mittal, Sarah Poon
Adviser: Marti Hearst
Motivation
Profile Apartment Hunters
Survey
Characterize User Needs
Survey
Personas
Assign Priorities to Common Tasks
Task
Priority
Specify
…
High
Task
Analysis
Survey
Personas
Explore the Competition
Task
Priority
Specify
…
High
Task
Analysis
Survey
Personas
Competitive
Evaluation
HousingMaps
Apartments.com
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Suggested Area Needs Assessment
Suggested Area Needs Assessment Results
Data Sources
HomeSkim
Craigslist
Data Sources
Yahoo Local
Google Maps - Driving Times & Distances
System Architecture
Craigslist
Transit info
Client Web Browser
User Interface
RSS feed (batch)
Apache Web Server
Query Params
HTTP GET
Geooding
Service
Parsing engine
(PHP/Perl)
Query Engine
(PHP)
JavaScript
HTML + CSS
AJAX
Engine
Result (XML)
MySQL
Local Business
Search
Parsed Data
Driving Directions
Design Iterations
26 miles 35 minutes
20 miles 27 minutes
Future Directions
• Enhancements
– Increase geographic scope
– Add data for neighborhood safety, school district
• Additional Applications
– Can be easily extended to other scenarios:
• Finding convenient meeting spots
(central to geographically dispersed people)
• Extension to other kinds of listings (car sales etc)
– Adapt to a cell phone application
• Use GPS to find available apartments/homes in the area