An Exploration of Real Estate Dreamers : Designing for non-conventional users of online marketplaces

Sammanfattning: Online marketplaces exist in many different industries and are a part of daily life for a vast number of people, taking up their time and energy, and affecting their mood. The real estate market has an abundance of marketplaces and each of these have a significant number of users. Amongst these the primary user is most often a potential buyer or seller, but there are also users who use these marketplaces in unexpected and unplanned-for ways. How then should real estate marketplaces consider and design for these non-conventional users in order to generate value for both the users and the business? The goal was to help designers, developers and commercial professionals better understand howtheir platforms are being used, and what can be done to align the business goals of the marketplaces with the user experiences of non-conventional users. The problem was tackled mainly by the use of semi-structured interviews with users and employees of the Swedish real estate platform Hemnet. The main result was in the form of seven recommendations; with the most important being the importance of having a definition of non-conventional users, to make sure they are included in strategy work and that employees have an understanding of this type of behaviour. This project opens up for further research on non-conventional users of marketplaces and indicates a value for academia and industry. Based on these results, marketplaces can now understand non-conventional users as important contributors in meeting business goals. This project was also a concrete case showing how the concept of the user and use is a complex issue and that simply dividing users into groups is not always the answer.