Insight

A smarter way to rent in London at a glance

Find Properly is a London-based property search website. What makes them different from any of their competitors is demonstrated in a nifty little tool they coin “cool things”. This houses some really interesting, insightful and easy to view interactive charts that make the process of finding a house a little bit easier, more informed or at least more entertaining.

A few weeks ago they published a new tool in the series that automatically generates suggestions on where you should move if you want to save money and cut your commuting time.

These are the 3 key things that we absolutely loved about the tools…

1. It’s useful
This is what we are looking for in an interactive right? A tool that actually makes our life a little bit easier when it comes to those monotonous tasks. Finding a property can mean wading through hundreds if not thousands of properties to find that dream humble abode. That, piled with lots of differentials make this tool very useful to narrow down and be informed.

2. It’s original
We might be a little bit obsessed with London’s housing prices. We all hate spending approx. 50% of our wage just paying the rent, but wasting 3 hours per day commuting can make you as miserable as seeing your balance being halved at the beginning of the month. Find Properly have an interesting angle here: it’s not just about the money, but also about cutting your journey to work.

3. It’s good data work
There’s a lot of public data out there. The real challenge is finding the right combinations. This one really nails it by mashing Zoopla and TFL, and it’s not the first time that Find Properly use transport data to create good tools. we particularly like this one, that helps you to find out if it is worth cycling from any location in London.

…and here are two things that could be instantly improved…

1. The axis is not 100% clear
If we’ve understood it right, when you hover over a station the arrows show how much money and how much time you will save if you move to that place. This is great as a concept, but I’m not sure if every user is going to understand it. At least, at Infogr8’s office we found that a little bit confusing. It could be improved with a slight copy change.

2. The colour code is unnecessary
Every tube station represented in the graph has a colour. We’ve been discussing this with the design team and we were struggling to understand the rationale behind the colours used. The colour of each station doesn’t match the colour of London Undeground’s lines and there’s not a legend to explain what the colours represent. Perhaps it was to make it easier to differentiate the names when they are very close to each other, although I’m sure there are less misleading ways of doing that.

Infogr8 is an information design agency, so we are probably more demanding than the regular user. But, despite the minor flaws that we mentioned above, we absolutely love this tool. In fact, two members of the team are using it as a starting point to find their new home right now.

We’ll look forward to keeping an eye on find properly’s visual developments through the year.