Apartments.com
Reimagining The Favorites Experience
Role
Product Design Intern
Team
3 designers, 1 manager
Timeline
10 weeks
Outcome
Usability testing, stakeholder reviews, design critiques
Overview
The mobile “Favorites” experience doesn’t support modern-day apartment hunting.
As a Product Design Intern at Apartments.com in Atlanta, GA, I was tasked with improving the Favorites experience. A key feature renters use to save, organize, and revisit apartment listings is the “Favorites” experience. This included rethinking how users add favorites, navigate to the Favorites page, and interact with their saved listings throughout their search journey.
Solution
An overview of the UI features and a more unified experience.
Problem
Apartments.com doesn’t support modern-day apartment searching.
Favoriting is a core Apartments.com feature, but the current experience is poor, especially in mobile devices. It falls short of what modern renters need, especially those searching collaboratively. Renters today are doing much more—organizing, comparing, and collaborating with family, partners, or roommates.
Becoming My Users
I wanted to see the pain points first-hand...so I tried the experience myself!
I began by jotting down gaps within the experience that made me feel frustrated, unfulfilled, or any missed opportunities by going through the end-to-end experience. All the way from liking a listing, trying to share a specific listing, and finding the page. Through this, I was better able to understand both the product, the flow, and the user. Additionally, I compared the Apartments ‘Favorites’ with other products and competitors.
Key Insight: It took the Lead Designer and I, hours to find the ‘Favorites’ page in the mobile version.
User Testing
The current experience was extremely frustrating.
After doing a user test on the current experience, more than half were negative sentiments, and 30% were neutral sentiments, meaning some had mild doubts during the test. After synthesizing the main themes, here’s what I found...
Pain Points
Static
Users expected a confirmation, or some sort of output this led to lack of trust and poor UX.
Hard To Find
~80% of users dropped off, felt frustrated, or had mild confusions finding the Favorites page.
Unorganized
There’s no way to differentiate between listings saved a week or months ago, nor does it support collaboration.
User Research
Understanding how and why users use the Favorites for.
I went deep into understanding the Apartments.com experience, and the trends, patterns, and themes of how they used Favorites in the real estate, apartment search market. Furthermore, understand why they use the ‘Favorites’ to optimize for that reason. I conducted different user tests and surveys that asked if they even use the Favorites at all.
User Survey: Key Insights
Beyond everything, the Favorites feature acted as a decision-making tool for renters.
Sharing
Users saves to share with a partner or co-decision maker.
Revisit Apartments
For active users, favoriting is shortlisting for action, not passive browsing. Users use the favorites function as a core planning and memory aid when apartment hunting.
Visual Feedback
Most participants expected a simple, immediate visual confirmation
Market Analysis
De-bias assumptions; understand what’s being done internally and externally.
To understand how we can best leverage the ‘Favorites’ experience and see how it work across our biggest competitors, I explored different workflows in retail, food, social media, and real estate platforms. But, I focused on our biggest competitors, Airbnb and Zillow. Additionally, I explored within CoStar’s websites such as ForRent.com and Homes.com to understand and leverage what is being done internally.
Airbnb
Zillow
Homes.com
A/B Testing
A/B tested where to place the Favorites page for ease of access.
To determine the optimal placement for the “Favorites” icon, I conducted two A/B test iterations, focusing on both usability (time-to-access, mis-click rate) and business impact (feature discoverability and engagement).
Users performed better with the Exposed Filter, but most preferred the Pill Filter—this mismatch signaled a need for further iteration.
Exposed Line Item
I designed iteration A because on Apartments current experience, most users expected to find the Favorites page inside the menu.
In the A/B test, Maze insights showed that users completed the task faster with iteration A than with B.
Pill Filter
When testing the current Apartments experience, based on the mis-click rates users checked the filter pills to find the Favorites page, guiding my reasoning for iteration B.
In this A/B test, however, mis-click rates showed users often skipped the pill, increasing task time. Yet when asked, most still preferred the Pill Filter variant.
Iteration
The Favorites page had to be accessible globally.
After looking at our other network sites such as ForRent network, and platforms like Airbnb and Zillow, one thing I noticed was that the Favorites page was accessible in every screen. Because users liked
User Survey Insights
72% of users expected clear visual feedback.
The user survey revealed that many the majority of users were struggling to correctly know whether their listing had been placed on their Favorites, causing lack of trust and clarity.
Users search for apartments for many reasons, from lease expiration and helping family to exploring the market.
To understand why users search for apartments, I asked: What factors or circumstances lead you to search for an apartment?
The survey revealed that the Favorites experience lacked the organization users needed. Many search frequently—often at least once a year and some help family members, like children, find apartments, juggling multiple searches at once.
This highlighted the need for a feature that lets users organize and group listings, supporting parallel searches that happen at different times throughout the year.
No centralized and efficient way to take notes of listings.
How do users keep track of apartments they’re interested in?
When surveying users about how they track apartments, most said they use manual notes. This method is inefficient, as notes can be lost or scattered. This highlighted the need to unify the experience, allowing users to take and organize notes directly within the app.
Final Designs
Feature 1: Global Access To “Favorites” Page
High visibility (it wasn't hidden behind extra taps)
Minimal UI disruption
One-click access, reducing friction and making it an immediately discoverable feature for users
Feature 2: Toast Notifications
A shareable list replaced the tedious process of copying and pasting multiple URLs, making collaboration effortless.
Users expected something after liking the listing. Increasing the trust with the user and the product.
Feature 3: Lists
To improve organization, the “List” feature supports multiple apartment searches at the same time.
Whether the user is a mom looking for an apartment for herself, while helping her son look for a college apartments as well, or distinguishing whether you apartment hunted last year, and want to differentiate between your current apartment hunt.
Feature 4: Notes
The apartment search experience required a centralized hub where users could seamlessly collaborate.
Allowing users to annotate listings and highlight favorites within shared lists significantly enhanced collaboration.
Feature 5: Sharing
A shareable list replaced the tedious process of copying and pasting multiple URLs, making collaboration effortless.
Sharing apartment listings used to mean copying and pasting multiple URLs. We eliminated this friction by creating shareable lists where users could collect and send all their favorite properties at once—a far more efficient experience.
Considering All Experiences
And what about the receiving end? What does their screen look like?
I also thought about how might the receiver get this list, and how their screen might look like. Considering hwo they would open it, what the link would look like, and the steps they’d have to take to join the list.
Receiver’s View
An increase in user acquisition through shared lists.
This was important to consider to understand the complete flow, and allow for better accessibility all around the experience. This is particularly significant as it would mean more users coming back and introducing users to Apartments.com.
Outcome
Presented to VP of Product, Product Design Manager, and Lead Designer!
I worked on three projects, including my ForRent University redesign, brand-aligned 34 marketing templates for their MyMedia library, and reimagined the "Favorites" experience.
Demo Day
Reflection
What I learned
Get feedback from product managers more
Although, I was frequently asking for help whether that was to my manager or the designers. I did not get feedback from product managers until the end of my internship. Understanding our limitations was important when considering different design choices.
Be open to exploring
I found myself scrapping ideas that weren't fleshed out because I was focusing on making something practical and feasible. However, I learned that it is okay to go outside of the box and really try different ideas because sometimes the best results come from unexpected ideas.
© 2025 Laura Cai Wu