Mobility Need-Adaptive Housing Platforms: The Benefit of a Commute Time Search Feature

The growing influx of people to urban areas has resulted in a tense housing market in many places, making the search for a suitable residence an increased challenge. Dedicated online platforms facilitate this process and offer two distinct approaches to find suitable accommodations concerning its location. Traditionally, users can search for a general area like a city to narrow down the results displayed. Additionally, some platforms offer searches based on the maximum commute time between apartments and points of interest. This paper investigates the benefit such approaches yield concerning technology acceptance and the fit of the task and information representation. Thus, a prototypically implemented online platform with and without a commute time search feature was evaluated in an online experiment. The treatment specification achieved significantly better results in terms of information quality and technology acceptance, implicating that such a design should be preferred for websites that facilitate the search for apartments. These insights can contribute to an enhanced understanding of visual system design to reduce the negative sustainability impacts of traffic induced by a divergence of residential and workplaces.