Hex Housing
Rental search now runs straight from the browser's location with no sign-in, and latency came down 40%.
The problem
Tenants had to create an account before they could find out whether anything was listed near them at all.
Sign-in walls lose renters
The original flow asked for an account before it showed a single listing. That is a reasonable way to collect emails and a terrible way to answer the only question a renter has, which is whether this site knows about anything near them.
Removing the gate meant the geolocation query had to be fast enough to justify itself on first paint, with no session to cache against.
Where the 40% came from
Most of it was query shape and payload: narrowing the geo lookup to a bounded box before the distance sort, and sending only the fields the result card actually renders.
- Role
- Full-stack
- Year
- 2023
- Stack
- Next.js, Tailwind, NextUI, SWR