End-to-End UX with Roomalign
Project summary
What makes a home?
How could we capitalize on a robust co-living market?
This was a two-week sprint completed with Katie Snider and Rico Peng.
I worked as a user experience designer responsible for synthesizing the research data, wireframing, and creating the medium-fidelity prototype.
Here’s the problem.
30% of adults aged 23-65 live with roommates.
What if the country’s oldest real estate portal, HomeFinder, decided to enter the co-living market? How could they leverage their existing platform to take control of this space? With such a large number of adults living with roommates, especially in urban markets, there was a lot of promise in this sector. The problem? How do you create something new without negatively impacting the old?
Divide and conquer or evolve and adapt?
HomeFinder’s current platform offered a straightforward way for people to engage with the real estate market. Entering the co-living market created a crossroad.
Do we overhaul what already works to implement this new service or do we branch out and create something new? After extensive research via surveys, interviews, and usability testing, the solution became clear.
Here’s what we came up with.
We discovered that getting along is the most important factor when living with someone else, but what that means is unique to everyone.
So, we designed a platform that allows people to find roommates based on unique attributes having to do with getting along with one another. Since this experience included such a strong social component, we felt that it was safer and smarter to branch out and create a branded mobile app for HomeFinder. Through good form design, clear content hierarchy, and a thumb-friendly mobile experience, we created a fun, friendly, and intuitive user experience.
Surveys and secondary research
Show me the numbers
Incentivizing participation.
Our team began research by distributing an online survey. By raffling off a $50 Amazon Gift Card, we were able to pull in over 65 participants. The insight we gained helped us to start answering some of the broader questions we had while we scheduled in-person interviews to dig into finer details.
We wanted to get a sense of how people felt about living with others and possibly uncover any glaring trends.
Specifically, we looked at:
The importance of budget, location, and getting along with roommates (quantitative and qualitative)
The importance of factors like age, pet friendliness, shared values, daily routines, and more (quantitative and qualitative)
People’s best and worst experiences with roommates (qualitative)
When selecting a roommate, how important are the following factors?
Have you ever had a roommate you did not know prior to moving in?
Leveraging existing research.
Aside from our research, a 2017 Zillow study showed that 30% of adults aged 23-65 live with roommates. In urban areas, that percentage grows to 40%. In contrast, it was only 21% in 2005.
Using qualitative insight
It’s ok, you can vent
“We gave each other space.”
“He was never home.”
“We became best friends.”
“We loved the same music.”
We conducted seven one-on-one interviews to explore:
How people decided to live with someone
How people handled conflict with their roommates
What defined “getting along” when it came to roommates
Here were the key takeaways:
Similar to our survey data, a majority of our interviewees valued getting along more than budget and location
What getting along meant was unique to everyone
Need-finding with interviews
A casual interview with Olivia about her experiences with roommates.
Things get juicy around 1:50 and super-juicy around 3:20. I normally would never breach anonymity, but I reached out to Olivia and got her permission to post this.
Competitive and comparative analysis
What can our competitors teach us?
Overwhelmed by noise.
We chose to focus on platforms that allowed a user to find or rent a home.
Why? If HomeFinder wanted to differentiate itself in a crowded market, we needed to be certain of what the competition was doing well and what could have been improved.
Additionally, we looked at dating and friend-finding platforms to see how people met and interacted online. Although online dating and friendships are becoming more common, this behavior is much more common within Generation Z and millennials. We wanted to make sure the experience was welcoming to users of all ages.
These three home-finding/apartment-finding platforms focused heavily on maps, images, location, and budget. None of them included a social feature. Despite their aesthetic and functional feel, searching for a room on these platforms created a massive amount of noise.
We need to allow people to find housing based on compatibility with potential roommates without creating the amount of noise present within our competitors.
Here’s the insight
Getting along over everything
But what the hell does “getting along” mean?
Why do some people value certain factors more than others? What are those?
We quickly realized this line of questioning was a rabbit hole with no end, but once we took a step back, the big idea became clear.
Let people sort prospective roommates by values unique and important to them.
Cutting through the noise
Since our data showed people value getting along more than budget, location, and other housing factors, we proposed the following:
If we allow people to find roommates based on unique attributes having to do with getting along with one another, then we are likely to see an increase in matches on and usage of HomeFinder.
Feature prioritization
Focusing on what’s important
How we prioritized features.
We chose to focus on high-impact and low-cost features first.
Since this platform would be such a substantial departure from HomeFinder’s current offerings, we decided that it would be better to test out this concept in an external application. Moreover, this would be cheaper than reconfiguring and rebranding HomeFinder’s entire website to allow users to match with one another.
Sketch, scrap, and repeat.
We used the design studio approach when working on our initial sketches.
With all of our insights, we each went away for the weekend and drafted out some concepts. From the first pass, I focused mainly on the user's thumbs and their ability to quickly reach and tap buttons. I included location, budget, and whether the user was looking for or offering a room.
Highlights from our low-fidelity prototype
Going digital
What are you looking for?
We went for thumb-friendliness, so that the user could easily use the app with one hand.
After launching the app, the user is prompted to enter their desired location and budget. They are also given the option to designate whether they are offering a room or looking for a place.
Since this is essentially a form, we wanted to only ask for the essentials and keep things light.
Who are you as a roommate?
This is where the core functionality begins.
The user enters a display name and selects five qualities or factors that they align with the most as a roommate.
Users can only select five choices so that they are forced to prioritize the qualities that are important to them. For example, if User A had cleanliness in their Top 5, but User B did not, there would likely be conflict around what cleanliness means to them.
No more noise.
With their Top 5 selected, along with location and budget, the user is presented with potential matches.
Already, there is a much cleaner results page when compared to Trulia or Craigslist. Results are sorted by match percentage along with each user’s Top 5.
A mini retrospective
Bringing it all together
Here’s the feedback we got.
The major feedback we got was that users wanted a bio of some sort to provide more information about themselves beyond just some pre-defined attributes.
Still, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
“Really easy to use.”
“It’s intuitive and fun.”
“I’d download it today.”
Did we solve the problem?
Most definitely. The feedback we got validated that an experience like this is not only useful, but incredibly welcomed. So many people we surveyed and interviewed told us horror stories about roommates they had that they did not know prior to living together. By allowing people to find prospective roommates or move in somewhere that has likeminded tenants, we could increase the chances of harmonious living environment. The end result? More usage and recognition of a HomeFinder product as well as stable tenants that don’t feel pressured to leave.
One more thing
Another iteration.
Our sprint ended with the low-fidelity mockups above. But I’m not a fan of leaving things unfinished.
I decided to implement the feedback we got from our low-fidelity prototype and run additional usability testing to polish up some flows.
Here’s what I found out and focused on:
Cleaner form design that better communicated what was going on, indicated how much of a commitment the user was making, and how much they have left to do
Communicating system status via color
Allowing the user to have a profile picture and short bio
Cleaning up content hierarchy and visual design patterns
A bit about me
One of my favorite video game series is Kingdom Hearts. I played the first installment in the series when I was eight or nine-years-old, so it holds a special place in my heart.