Find My Roommies
A platform for international students to find their perfect shared homes based on housemates compatibility.
Overview
International students face home searching challenges when they first move to Vancouver. They have budget limitations, don’t know the town very well and most importantly they are here alone.
They hardly ever consider roommates as one of the critical factors when searching for a house. However, based on our findings, the people they live with are the top reason that gives them bad living experience.
Interview users to explore problems
Our target users are international students. we interviewed 7 international students in Tamwood college to learn about their house searching experience in Vancouver.
Verify users' pain points
We analyzed user journey based on interview results and identified the pain points below:
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Users don’t know much about the area
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Some ads don't have all the important information
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Users have safety concerns when going for house viewing alone
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Find out later after moving in that they cannot get along well with their housemates
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It's hard to tell if the post is a scam or real
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Ad owners ignore their messages
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High competitive
Hypothesis: The current state of the shared home-finding platforms has focussed primarily on individuals looking for a place to stay.
What existing products/services fail to address is users have no idea of the people they are sharing the house with
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How might we introduce a new platform to address the gap?
Solutions
After the brainstorming session, my teammate and I came up with ideas to solve users’ problems. We applied prioritizing map to justify features for our product.
Problems
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Users don’t know much about the area​​
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Ads don't have all the important information
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​Safety concerns when going for house viewing alone
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Find out later after moving in that they cannot get along well with housemates
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It's hard to tell if the post is a scam or real
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Ad owners ignore their messages
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High competitive
Solution
> Reviews of areas​
> Form with important information that ad posters are required to fill up​
> Feature to "mark themselves safe" after house viewing​
> Personality assessment​
> Filters of interests
> Ads are shown based on personality compatibility
> "Report" feature for danger or scam​
> Notification to ad posters to response messages​
> A feature that tells where you are in the cue
User Flows & Sketch
User flows for the product are created as per the solutions we defined. Then each of us worked separately to come up with our own version of the sketch. Finally, we discussed and selected screens for each step of our product.
Wireframe
Because we have a long task flow we divided it into 4 user flows so our users don’t get overwhelmed by the usability test
Flow 1
Create account > Personality assessment
Flow 2
Search and save houses to 'favorite'
Flow 3
Contact your favorite house and book house viewing date
Flow 4
Set security code > Confirm safety / report house
Usability Test I
We conducted a usability test with 5 users for our 1st prototype design. Here are our findings which we later took into our consideration for design iteration:
Flow 1
Create account > Personality assessment
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2 users didn’t select 5 interests during the process
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Personality test tutorial and questionnaires are too complicated
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(+) Suggestion to add age and gender
Flow 2
Search and save houses to 'favorite'
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2 users were confused by room numbers in the filter function
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1 user didn’t understand the swipe tutorial
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(+) Suggestion to add location under search
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(+) Suggestion to add capacity of the house
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(+) Suggestion that they want to see more than one photo of the house and also roommates or landlord photo
Flow 3
Contact your favorite house and book house viewing date
Flow 4
Set security code > Confirm safety / report house
No issue
Iteration
Flow 1
Create account > Personality assessment
Log in page
Sign up page
Personality test questions and tutorial
Flow 2
Search and save houses to 'favorite'
Home page
Swipe tutorial
Search page
Flow 3
Contact your favorite house and book house viewing date
Home page
Usability Test II
After iterating our design, we proceeded to do the 2nd usability test for the same task again with 3 users.
Simpler text is more understandable for international students who are not fluent in English
Users enjoy checking more ad photos on the homepage
Users can use our filter function more intuitively
Longer tutorial pages help users navigate our platform more smoothly
Menu icons are more noticeable. Users went straight to the favorite icon for task 3
Hi-Fi Design
Define a style tile
Color: Inspired by dating apps, we use warm tone color as orange to be our primary color.
Font: We chose San Sarif - Montserrat to be our only typography because of the readability reason. Information hierarchy was created by font size and variation.
Mock Up
Conclusion
In addition to focusing to solve user pain points, it is also important that a new product applies the function or feature that target users are already familiar with to reduce cognitive load, in our case swipe to save to "favorite" feature.
Based on the interview results, the top favorite features that users like the most are swipe to save, report safety, and calendar booking via chat respectively.
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For future improvement, our team is interested in improving this platform to be a one-stop service for shared home renting; from searching, booking house viewing, signing the contract, making payment, etc.