Rentez: A Simplified Rental App Experience Designed to Promote Transparency and Verification

Each year many international students arrive in Canada with dreams of outstanding academic and professional careers but are met with a sad reality: the time-consuming and inconvenient process of finding suitable accommodation. There are currently a large number of unverified rental posts on platforms such as Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji, where renters are frequently confused by listings that lack adequate information/details or are outright fraudulent. This project aims to design an optimized rental app that will allow renters to find legitimate sources of rental properties. Most importantly, it will ensure communication between the renter and the listing/ad owner. This Major Research Project will investigate the ways in which user experience design might be utilized to address the issues that users face in the real world. This incorporates both research and analytical work. Additionally, wireframing and prototyping, as well as other types of design thinking, were investigated throughout the course of this paper. Methods pertaining to the user experience and the user interface were implemented in this project to create an interactive and seamless experience.