01. project overview
We were asked by WUSTL to design an roommate matching App for their students’ internal use last summer. The university has been having issues for lacking a direct tool to match students with their compatible roommates for a long time. The goal of Uniroomie is to create a platform to help them find the perfect roommates easily, fast and convenient.
TEAM ： Vickey Lu Mingfei Bi
ROLE ： UX Researcher UX Designer
PROJECT ： Campus tool/mobile app
PRACTICES : A/B Testing Competitive Analysis
User Interviews
introducing uniroomie
02. research
defining the challenge
College students all run into all kinds of problematic situations as college students living in campus. The most prominent issue is, according to a 100-people survey, that students are always randomly assigned new roommates by the school. This causes a lot of conflicts among students since they are not always getting along with each other.
National report of first year College student Roommate Satisfaction*
* reference: Katlyn M. Hale, Pacific University
National Undergraduate Report
40.4% students are not satisfied with their roommates.
63.5% students frequently or occasionally feel lonely or homesick.*
persona
We interviewed 6 university students, they all showed concerns about whether they could find a roommate and how much this can effect their campus life.
user interviews
By interviewing five students who had roommates before and mapping out what they actually cared about while living with other people, we found out that there are many overlaps among their concerns. Some key words frequently being stressed. So we categorize them into groups and highlighted the key word that appeared the most times.
competitive analysis
Apparently, most of the softwares haven‘t thought about the pre-rule setting, which helps Uniroomie stands out from room-matching apps.
03. ideation
speedating storyboards
what types of problems have you run into in terms of roommates in college?
Alex has always been having trouble finding a roommate since he only knows limited people when he comes to the new school.
2. Brain and Mike always fight with each other due to the
unresolvable personality conflicts. Brain and Mike find
each other through facebook.
3. Ryan was assigned a new roommate by
the school. For him, it’s a X-man who he
nothing about at all.
brainstorms
The overall roommate challenge we found out here is basically caused by laking of communication among students. So we listed out all the possibilities to help solve this problem through technology. Especially we are using those tool such as text messages, video chats everyday. Those tools would definitely make two people getting to know each other easier.
how do they connect?
When we are taking a look at other features, we discovered that there are no competitors offering the same features we offered: pre-set roommate rules, filtering preference ( life habit etc.) and we also added real time sync with school’s housing department to keep all the data up to date. In addition, we still offer the general matching criteria that other competitors have: Basic info - Search by filter - Connect or not - Chat - Pre-rule send - Agreed - Match.
wireframes
04. design details
branding
We choose the color orange to create a feeling of welcoming and comforting and match it with a series of warm grays. We hope those colors tell the story of finding the right roommate is like coming back home. Also these pop-out orange colors would bring delight and joy to people.
interactive prototype
design specifications
05. reflection & next step
This is the first iteration of this roommate finding App. We found that a lot of the features were already developed by some competitors in the market. So to make our product stand out, we still need to dig a little bit deeper to better assist this communication. For example, if we were to develop calendar function for the two people, so that it could remind them on a specific date to meet up. Or see what other possibility that we can come up with to further assist communication.
Also, we should think about safety and private issue. We want to make this communication easier and bring two people closer, but we don’t want to become a platform that spread data that would facilitate crime. We have to make sure data’s accuracy and user’s privacy.