Flâneur
App Dev | UX/UI Design
When I moved to New York City in 2022, I struggled to find an apartment that met my personal criteria. Most of the commonly-used websites didn’t have the filters I needed to narrow it down, and focused almost exclusively on cost and location. So, I decided to build my own app to help NY apartment seekers: Flâneur (the French word for “wander”), which would focus on other key quality-of-life features like walkability, access to the NYC subway, pet-friendliness, and in-unit laundry.
User Flows
I began with some core principles: the app should be super-streamlined, with an extreme emphasis on usability and simplicity. I wanted to nail down the optimal path through an apartment-rental application before designing a visual identity to match, so I sketched out the “happy path” user flows.
Visual Identity
Inspired by metro systems around the world, I established a design system to help solidify what would become the future UI of the application, creating a logo and color palette, choosing evocative typography for text, and standardizing button and link styles.
Wireframing & Prototyping
Next, I sketched up some lo-fi wireframes to match my user flows and started to figure out the UI design patterns I was going to use for different views.
Final Designs & App Development
At this stage, it was time to turn the wireframes into hi-fidelity prototypes and, eventually, a finished product. Working in Figma and then using Bootstrap to code, I created two final and functional versions of the app for desktop and mobile.
Mobile
While most applications use responsive design, I decided that a more adventurous mobile version would allow me to grow my skills and practice building a device-native, parallax scrolling design. I took more risks with this one, but I think it turned out quite well!
