1. Apartment Searching made Easier SIMS 2006 Masters Final Project Melissa Chan, Irina Lib, Kavita Mittal, Sarah Poon Adviser: Marti Hearst

2. Motivation

4. Profile Apartment Hunters Survey

5. Characterize User Needs Survey Personas

6. Assign Priorities to Common Tasks Survey Personas Task Analysis TaskPriority Specify … High

7. Explore the Competition Survey Personas Task Analysis TaskPriority Specify … High Competitive Evaluation

8. HousingMaps

9. Apartments.com

10. Low-Fidelity Prototype

11. Suggested Area Needs Assessment

12. Suggested Area Needs Assessment Results

13. Data Sources HomeSkim

14. Craigslist

15. Data Sources

16. Yahoo Local

17. Google Maps - Driving Times & Distances

18. System Architecture MySQL Parsing engine (PHP/Perl) Query Engine (PHP) User Interface AJAX Engine JavaScriptHTML + CSS Craigslist RSS feed (batch) Transit info Query Params HTTP GET Apache Web Server Client Web Browser Result (XML) Local Business Search Parsed Data Geooding Service Driving Directions

19. Design Iterations

30. 26 miles 35 minutes 20 miles 27 minutes

38. 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