Roommates: Solving the Millennial Crisis

The Challenge: Design a mobile product experience that appeals to millennials that makes it safe to find the ideal roommate in New York City. Design the experience from the perspective of a person who is looking for a roommate. We are looking for you to identify pain points in "find/keeping a good roommate" journey and to find ways to solve for those pain points.

The Problem: Locating a reliable, safe, and compatible roommate in a large and diverse metroplex area.
The Design Process
Step 1: Find 3 people currently living with roommate(s) to interview.
Step 2: Create interview questions to learn how connections were made with their roommate(s).
Step 3: Schedule and conduct in-person interview with a recording device.
Step 4: Analyze collected data.
Step 5: Brainstorm solutions and create low-fidelity wireframes.
Step 6: Test wireframes for feedback.

Repeat steps 4-6

Step 7: Release product.
Interviewees
Objective: To find out what people look for when searching for a roommate.

Time: 20-30 min

Setting: One-on-One in person interviews
Goal: Ask Thoughtful Questions
  • Avoid Yes or No questions
  • Ask follow up questions
  • Avoid speculation or leading questions

"Why did you decide to live with your current roommate?"

"Tell me about what it's like living with your roommate?"

"Where did you meeting your roommate?"

​"Tell me about the last time you and your roommate did an activity together?"
Interview Key Results
Trends:
  • Chose to live with a roommate to save money.
  • Picked someone already knew when available.
  • Sometimes used Craigslist in the past, but not always a good experience.
  • Considers roommate to be a business transaction - there needs to be mutual respect from both parties.
Analyze Collected Data
I created a venn diagram in order to organize the data collected in my interviews. I separated the extreme qualities of a "bad" or "good" roommate, with the overlapping "realistic" qualities in the middle.
Create, Create, Create
I created three different UI Flow options for my roommate mobile app, and decided the third flow would be the best option for this case.
Brainstorm
Here is where I get my ideas out on paper in order to better visualize the final product.
Prototype
I created a working prototype to test on my users using marvelapp.
It was very effective for testing the idea on my participants.

You can test out the prototype yourself here:
https://marvelapp.com/d15394e
User Testing and Feedback
I received feedback by walking the user through the app or sending it to them via email/text to go through on their own time, since most of my users had time-constraints. Most of the feedback I received include minor adjustments such as moving the "save" button to maintain consistency or adding more interactive functions on the user's profile. I was also told the app functions like a dating app, making it easy to navigate and fun to answer the questions. The similarity of navigation on the roommate finder app compared to a dating app allows the user to have some intuition when navigating the app, with minimal discovery throughout.
Next Steps
The next steps for this project would be to re-iterate my wireframes based on the feedback I received to improve the product, and conduct more user testing with high-fidelity prototypes in order to validate my solution.