Twice a year, Hemnet organises Lab Week - a time and space for Hemnet employees to experiment, hack around and evaluate their own creative ideas, or join others.

In this blog post, we'll give you a glimpse of what happens during this week of innovation and collaboration. Read more about what some of our colleagues have been working on. 

Tobias Palmér - Developer

Idea: Hemnet inspirations - social media feed for real estate.

What were your expectations for Lab Week?

I was excited to see how far we would get with our idea and how it would develop during the week. You pitch your idea and anyone who's interested can join the team. It's always interesting to get the other team members excited and mix each other's ideas and see how the project develops throughout the week. I was also hoping that by the end of the week we'd have a fully functional prototype.

How did you come up with your idea?

We have lot of high quality images of real estate listings and many homes have beautiful interior and exterior design. I wanted to take a social media-style approach where people could find inspiring images and like them. Then the plan was to be able to follow other users and create an inspirational feed of images based on the users you follow.

Who did you collaborate with?

Aa mixed team, one UX designer and three developers with different expertise

What did you learn during the Lab Week?

I learned a lot, especially in the technical area, where you can try different things without restrictions. I always do labs that have nothing to do with my daily work, so I learn new things. When you work in mixed teams, you also get to know other people.

How do you get inspired and where do you get your ideas from?

When you work at Hemnet every day, sometimes an idea pops into your head, and soon you have a few ideas that you can apply during lab week. I also look at other people's ideas and get inspired.

Anton Holmgren - Developer

Idea: Property search based on travel time.

Is it possible to use the GTFS Sverige 2 public transport dataset to generate a property search based on travel time. For example, what properties are available within 30 minutes travel time from Hötorget?

What were your expectations for the week?

To get things working as a proof of concept and experiment with graph building. I used Python and NetworkX to build and traverse graphs and Shapely to generate geometries to be used for search. I like that the format of a full week allows me to tackle bigger things, like this project.

Johan Burmester - UX Designer

Idea: Visualise the customer journey.

At Hemnet, we want to not only help our customers find their dream property, but also educate them about what they can do when they want to sell their property.

What are your expectations for Lab Week?

It's a time to explore your own ideas and have fun seeing what other people will do. My personal goal is to develop a product for the end user.

How did you come up with your idea?

I work in the property seller product area. The goal of my project is to figure out how to help customers get started in the sales process. After a code along session, I learned how to work with the component library - now next.js is running on my computer, so I can drive the development myself.

How do you get inspired and where do you get your ideas?

I see things that lack user design or hear things in customer interviews where I get a lot of ideas and inspiration.

Caroline Lindström - UX Designer

Tell us about your week.

In previous Lab Weeks I've done big projects and it was super fun. This time I pushed myself to get out of my usual box and do something completely different to change the content. This lab week I did things that I enjoy and that excite me.

I didn't have a big plan for the whole week, I just wanted to experiment with colors and design, do fun little things, explore our system and brand, try to code simple pages with illustrations, make animations etc. My goal was to be creative and explore.

Tova Boustedt - Development Manager

Idea: Visualise publication flow.

At Hemnet, before properties are visible on the website, each property listing goes through an automatic publication flow, a sequence of checks and reviews. I wanted to visualise this using Figma and our component library.

How did you come up with your idea?

This is something I used to work with and something my team is working with now. As the product evolved and the domain became more complex, I wanted to help us visualise what was going on.

How do you get inspired and where do you get your ideas?

I attended a session on React.js and our component library and that was a good start! I get inspired by watching our sprint demos, when people show prototypes and learnings. I'm glad we do Lab Weeks twice a year - it's fun to see the energy of people in the office and it's inspiring to see new teams and colleagues come together!

Michelle Rea - Product Manager

What are your expectations for lab week?

To learn, collaborate with others and be able to run an experiment.

How did you come up with your idea?

I worked on one of the areas during a previous lab week and really got excited about the idea. For this lab, we used a product discovery approach within the lab week.

What did you learn during the week?

There are many areas we can explore, we can learn a lot from smoke testing and we should dare to experiment more. We can test smart and refine the way we learn.

How do you get inspired and where do you get your ideas from?

Ideas are always in my head, I'm curious and passionate about the area, and users' pain points. I get inspiration from my mom who is a real estate agent in the US.