Heuristic Evaluation - REALTOR.ca

My teammate, Bing and I used Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics for UI Design to identify any usability problems in the design of the real estate app for REALTOR.ca. REALTOR helps the user search for home listings in their area, provides filters to find specific listings and provides contact information to the realtor.

Based on the evaluation, we proposed a new design to help mitigate those user issues and improve the user experience. We had to keep the same colour palette and font as the ones REALTOR.ca used in their app without adding new ones. 

Project
Heuristic Evaluation and Design Proposal in 2 weeks

My Role
Analyzing design, UX/UI designer, Stitching Prototype

Team
Bing Wu

Tools
Pen & Paper, Figma, InVision

Platform
Android

User Flow

To conduct the Heuristic Evaluation, we followed this user flow:

Heuristic Evaluation

We identified 7 usability heuristics out of the 10 and rated each heuristic based on the severity of usability. We determined the severity rating to be a 2 - a minor usability problem where the users can accomplish their task and use the app but it can still be frustrating using it. 

For more details on the heuristics we found and reccomendations, please take a look here.

Design Proposal

For our design proposal, we had used the same colour palette and typography (Source Sans Pro) that REALTOR uses. We mainly used the reds, greys and dark purple colours which complied with WCAG. 

Here are a few of the changes we designed following the user flow.

For more details on the design changes, please take a look here.

Prototype

You can try our proposed design base on our user flow:

1. Search a location.

2. Apply some filters.

3. Look at a property.

4. Get the realtor's contact info.

Reflections

Using the usability heuristics is a very useful method to identify possible UX problems in a design. It also helps to improve a design as customer expectations may change. This project has demonstated to me how important it is to keep designs consistent throughout and make sure parts are easy to recall to prevent frustations. Thanks again to Bing for being a great partner!