NoBroker - Personal Project
2023
Optimising NoBroker's Rental Discovery Experience
A personal UX/UI redesign of NoBroker's iOS experience, using usability testing, heuristic evaluation and information architecture to make high-frequency rental tasks easier to find and complete.
Overview
Redesigning a rental experience around what users actually came to do
NoBroker combines property discovery with a wide range of supporting services, from rentals and property sales to home services and payments.
I chose the product for a personal redesign project after experiencing difficulty navigating the iOS app myself. Although messages and recommended properties appeared in my notifications, finding them again inside the app was surprisingly tedious.
The goal was not to redesign every part of the product. I focused on understanding why important rental tasks were difficult to discover, then improving the navigation, information architecture and visual hierarchy around those tasks.
Disclaimer: This is an independent conceptual redesign. I am not affiliated with NoBroker.
Research & Diagnosis
Users knew what they wanted. They couldn't find where to do it.
Before redesigning the interface, I conducted task-based usability testing with 5 users to understand how people navigated the existing rental experience.
Participants were given realistic scenarios based around the primary rental journey:
Search for and shortlist rental properties.
Find previously shortlisted properties.
Locate messages after contacting property owners.
Find recommended properties mentioned in notifications.
Locate communication with their relationship manager.
The research revealed a recurring pattern: users repeatedly explored the bottom navigation, reopened the hamburger menu and searched through property listings to locate actions they expected to be readily accessible. I synthesised these observations through an empathy map to understand what users were saying, thinking, doing and feeling.
What users were experiencing
Key findings
01 — Essential features were difficult to locate: Users had to search through the interface to find messages, shortlists and other rental-related activities.
02 — The Home screen was overloaded: Too many services, promotions and secondary actions competed with property discovery.
03 — Navigation relied too much on recall: Users had to remember where particular features lived instead of being able to recognise them immediately.
04 — Familiar conventions were being broken: The bell icon was used for messages and feedback around shortlisted properties, creating a mismatch with users' expectations.
Key insight
The problem wasn't a lack of functionality. It was the difficulty of finding the functionality that already existed.
Heuristic Evaluation
Two screens exposed the structural problems
The heuristic evaluation focused on two high-impact screens: Home and Main Menu. Rather than evaluating the entire application, I used these two screens to examine how the product prioritised information, communicated navigation and supported recognition of frequently used actions. The evaluation revealed that the core problem was not simply visual clutter. The interface had accumulated features faster than its navigation structure had evolved.
Card sorting and Information architecture
From a feature list to a task-based structure
The heuristic evaluation showed where navigation was creating friction. The next question was: How should the information be organised instead? I used a closed card sort to explore a more intuitive distribution of the app's features and services. The goal was to improve information architecture and make important tasks easier to access.
This helped organise features into clearer groups based on their purpose and relationship to the user's task. Users could access high-frequency activities through dedicated navigation while keeping secondary services available without allowing them to dominate the primary rental journey. I wasn't removing functionality. I was changing where users had to look for it.
Redesign and Validation
Turning structural problems into measurable improvements
With the information architecture defined, I redesigned the key journeys around the new navigation structure. The redesign had two distinct goals:
Structural improvements: Make high-frequency rental actions easier to discover and access.
Visual improvements: Reduce clutter, establish stronger hierarchy and create a cleaner, more consistent interface.
Not every screen required a structural change. Search results and property details, for example, retained their core information and functionality while receiving primarily visual and hierarchy improvements.
Home screen: Reducing competition for attention
The Home screen was redesigned around property discovery. Property search remained prominent, while secondary content such as offers, services and preferences received clearer destinations rather than competing for space on the main screen. The bottom navigation was also restructured to prioritise frequently used functions.
Search & Property details screens: Improving hierarchy without changing the core information
Search results and property details were primarily visual redesigns. The core information and functionality were retained, while layout, spacing, hierarchy and component presentation were refined to make the property-hunting experience easier to scan.
Property related activity: Making rental activity easy to find
Shortlisted properties, contacted properties and property-visit appointments were previously buried within the larger navigation structure. I grouped these related activities into a dedicated destination, allowing users to move between them without repeatedly searching through menus.
Messages: If users know they have a message, they should know where to find it
Messages were one of the clearest discoverability problems identified during research. The redesigned experience gave communication its own destination, with clearer categorisation for different message types such as relationship managers, property owners and NoBroker services.
Profile: Giving personal functions a clear home
Functions related to the user's own activity were moved into the Profile experience. This included: My property listings, Post my property, My bookings, NBcash wallet, Rewards and account-related information and more. This separated personal/account functions from the primary rental-discovery journey.
Did the redesign actually make the tasks easier?
A second round of usability testing was used to compare the original and redesigned task flows. The testing covered five representative tasks from the rental journey. I evaluated four KPIs:
Task success rate: Could users complete the task?
Time taken: How long did completion take?
Number of clicks: How much interaction was required?
User satisfaction: How did users rate the experience?
Outcomes & Reflection
Small structural changes. Measurable UX improvements.
The redesign started with a simple observation: users were struggling to find functionality that already existed. Usability testing revealed the behavioural friction. A heuristic evaluation of the Home screen and Main Menu helped identify the structural causes. Card sorting then informed a new information architecture that separated primary rental activities from secondary services.
The redesign translated those structural decisions into clearer navigation, stronger visual hierarchy and more predictable destinations. Finally, A/B usability testing showed that the redesigned flows reduced task time substantially while maintaining or improving task success and satisfaction.
What I learned
01 — Navigation is a product decision: Where a feature lives can be as important as how the feature itself is designed.
02 — Heuristic evaluation can expose high-leverage problems: The Home screen and Main Menu contained structural issues that affected multiple downstream tasks.
03 — Information architecture reduces cognitive effort: Grouping features around user tasks can make a complex product easier to navigate without removing functionality.
04 — Visual design should reinforce structure: Reducing clutter only works when the underlying hierarchy is clear.
05 — Measure the redesign: A visually cleaner interface is not enough. The redesign should make important tasks measurably easier.
