Interface Study

WHAT: An interface study for a web app that offers a comparative view of apartment rentals in New York City. By moving from left to right, you can browse through rental units in a single neighborhood, say SoHo, with prices increasing to your right and decreasing to your left. By moving up and down, you can browse through similarly priced units in nearby neighborhoods, for example, what $2000 gets you from one neighborhood to the next.

WHY: Searching for an apartment is a royal pain in the ass. While most people have a ballpark range of what they'd like to spend and a range of what areas of the city are desirable to them, there is currently no way to constrain one axis and browse through another. LandLord lets you select a price, say $2000 for a 2 bedroom apartment, and by moving up and down you can see what's offered at that price from TriBeCa in the South to Harlem in the North. Similarly, you can choose a neighborhood like the East Village, and by moving from left to right you can explore all the listings within a price range. Pretty soon after trying it, a user is able to swiftly browse through both adjacent neighborhoods and adjacent prices with remarkable fluidity.

CAVEATS: While New York City's tall and narrow geography makes it especially conducive to a top-to-bottom arrangement of neighborhoods, most city neighborhoods can be easily arranged into a top-to-bottom list as well. Please excuse how half-assed and ugly this is - it was a quick and dirty study that I decided to include here because I like the concept a lot.

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