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Ask YC: Review My Startup Request

ratemystudentrental.com

The value proposition and purpose are clear, but I'm not sure why you're focusing on students. It seems like it shouldn't be too bad to make it more generic and show good rentals within a decent radius of some user-supplied location. Also, if you're going to be appealing to landlords, I don't think "screwed" is a professional word to have in your slogan.

Even if the "Houses, Condos" etc. icons are supposed to work in the future, I think they're too huge and don't really add anything visually.

When I search for a rental, I think the map takes up too much space. I think I would prefer to decide which results to focus on based on the information returned first. The search results page kinda pisses me off because I can barely see the first result since it's taken up by this gigantic search box with so much space around the "Filters" drop-down menu.

On the "Browse Rentals" page...what's the purpose of this page? Why should I want to browse all the rentals available on your site when I'm only interested in some locations I have in mind already?

Otherwise, I think it is a good idea since people might start renting more and would like to know what they're getting into beforehand, but the site just looks really busy right now. Too many different colors; you have a million different shades of blue for example.

Ah, thank you very much. The "House, Condos,..." icons were a new addition to the site as of last night. I didn't even think of the fact that visitors would perceive those as links, so that is exactly what I'll make them. One of the problems we had been seeing is that users keep assuming that we only do houses, or only do apartments, because that is how everyone else operates, so we wanted to mitigate that popular assumption at the front page.

I agree about the enormous space the options boxes take up on the results page, and I'm still working on a redesign of that.

The browse rentals page doesn't serve much purpose other than to give casual views something to look at. Typically users who are actively looking for rentals either search for their school or type in a city or something, which of course returns much more relavent results.

Perhaps I'll change the results page for the "Browse Rentals" to show the schools on the map and allow the user to click one to narrow down the search.

As for the "screwed" in the slogan, most landlords love it. I've also won a couple Elevator pitch contests by working the slogan in there, and had people coming up to me the rest of the conferences laughing and saying how memorable it was. I think it's all about knowing your audience and your boundaries and then listening to feedback from your customers to make sure you're not going to far. As for us, most landlords love it too and agree whole-heartedly that they don't want to get "screwed" by student tenants.

And as a side note, when landlords log in to the site, all of the language and vocabulary on the site change to a much more professional tone.

Thank you very much for your feedback. We appreciate it a lot!

@your slogan- I laughed out loud when I read it, it's perfect :)

I figured it's about time to bite the bullet and get some feedback from a community I've come to respect and trust.

If anyone here is a student, it would be awesome if you could create an account (you may need me to add your school to the site first) and give it a whirl. Otherwise, just play around with it and let me know what you think.

Hopefully the value proposition and purpose of the site are clear on the homepage, so I'll let you have at it!

Oh, and one thing I would ask about in particular is what your opinions are on homepage calls to action.

RateMyStudentRental essentially needs students to rate their rentals. However, just saying "Rate your rental now" on the homepage doesn't offer much immediate benefit to the student, and thus does not convert very well. I've had several iterations of the homepage that I've tried out, and just recently made a change (last night) that focuses solely on "Browse Rentals" for the main call to action.

A lot of my knowledge on the subject matter comes from studies and reports such as this: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/improving-website-conver...

Anyway, your thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

I kept clicking those icons but they don't work. Then I scrolled down and that single pixel HR separating the entries was hard to see so I didn't get why the bubble boxes were there, with no pictures as well. Then the slanted background gave me a headache as I scrolled so I closed the window.

Good point on the icons, I'll fix that. Do you mind if I ask what OS/browser/display settings you're running? In the few months we've been testing the site at our school, you're the first user to complain about the stripes (including students and older landlords), but I take this sort of usability issue seriously.

I think the slanted strips background is a poor design choice. People may not have complained but have they applauded you on it?

A few have given us complements on it, yes, but both were students (i.e. younger probably with better eye-sight). The one I remember well enough to quote said, "I usually don't like dark-colored sites, but this one I definitely do."

Maybe we'll do a poll for our existing user's and see what they say. I've got no problem changing it if people don't like it... and I'm the only designer, so I've got no red tape to go through ;)

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