Role - October 2017 - April 2019

UX/UI / Responsive Web Design / UX Research / Copy Writer

Team

Worked alongside the engineering, marketing, data, and graphic design.

Introduction & Problem

ROOM8 is a mobile app that helps people find roommates, apartments, and renters insurance based on their needs. When I joined the ROOM8 team we quickly discovered that the UX/UI design of the app was not working to it’s potential, users were dropping off, and property management companies were frustrated with their experience using the app. Thus we decided to do re-examine the user journey from the perspective of a roommate and a property management company.

solution

We focused on a few very specific things in order to maximize productivity. See list below for details.

• We restructured on-boarding to collect necessary and important data from users in order to show them options that were relevant to their interests and lifestyles.

• We introduced an option to learn more and purchase renters insurance, powered by AAA Insurance, a CSAA Provider - which increased a process by which ROOM8 began to collect revenue.

• We developed a system for property management companies to list their available units on ROOM8, and rent out to users.

• We iterated on existing designs that enabled users to “match” with potential roommates, learn more about them, and create a dialogue with each other.

Goals

USER RESEARCH

ROOM8’s objective is to create a safe space for people to find potential roommates and apartments. The research goal was to identify target users’ needs and design a unique user experience.

To achieve that goal, the following questions had to be answered:

• What are the target audience’s lifestyle?

• How does the target currently find roommates/apartments?

• What are the target audience’s priorities?

• What excites the target audience about their living situation?

• What are the most needed features they want on a roommate finding app?

TARGET AUDIENCE

• Men and women age 25-45

• College students

• Mainly low to medium income group

METHODOLOGY

Before conducting our own primary research, we looked to the current rental market and learned more about how roommates effect the average person.

1. According to a new survey from Pew Research Center, almost one-in-three U.S. adults has an adult roommate who is not their romantic partner or a college student aged 18 to 24.

2. Long gone are the days when apartment hunters had to carefully scan the newspaper classifieds to find a place to live. Today, any renter can easily access millions of apartment listings through hundreds of digital databases and rental search engines. Frankly, the options can be overwhelming.

3. The number of households renting their home increased significantly from 2006-2016, which rose from 31.2% of households in 2006 to 36.6% in 2016. The current renting level exceeds the recent high of 36.2% set in 1986 and 1988 and approaches the rate of 37.0% in 1965.

After conducting our secondary research, it was time to hit the streets. We talked to 30 people standing outside of a coffee shop in the Financial District in San Francisco. Using an iPad to quickly collect data, we focused our conversations on learning more about how people go about finding roommates/apartments, and which elements of these searches are the most important to the user. We learned things like what kind of personality or habits people look for when looking for a roommate, and which parts of apartment hunting are the most painful. From 40 participants screened, we spoke with five.

RESULTS

Despite coming from a range of backgrounds, all of the participants expressed their pain points regarding looking for an apartment/roommate. When asked to describe elements of their roommate search 78% of participants selected that they found the process to be uncomfortable and awkward. When asked to describe elements of their apartment hunt, 93% of participants expressed that their journey was ‘stressful.’

“The hardest part about finding my apartment was the application process. San Francisco is super competitive, people show up to open houses with the deposit in hand. How can you compete with that?”

“I’d be nervous about finding a roommate through CraigsList, you never really know who they are.”

“I love my roommate, we have a great system going. Plus it helps that we’re both students with pretty much the same schedule.”

Exploration

IDEATION

With all the supporting research shown above, our team started to create iterations of hand-drawn sketches before diving into wireframing and prototyping. We worked together doing several renditions of low fidelity sketches on white boards and each of us individually came up with hand-drawn sketches. We shared our sketches with each other as a team for brainstorming and feedback and then iterated them with more polished clickable prototypes.

WIREFRAMES

USER TESTING FINDINGS

Overall, users responded well to the concept of ROOM8, and found their experience to be convenient and easy to understand.

“This app is so convenient. I love that it’s all in one place.

”A lot of places now require renters insurance, it’s so smart to have it available right here on the app, and I love that it sends my information to my landlord so I don’t have to.”

“I feel like using ROOM8 I could find someone I’d actually like living with.”

The largest issue we discovered during these tests was the confusion regarding how to find potential roommates that had a room available for rent that they were looking to fill. We had originally lumped all of the users together, in an effort to give people the highest chance of finding a roommate/room. However this turned out to be a significant inconvenience and lead to considerable drop-off. After establishing a filter system to view different kinds of rooms available (a room inside of an existing apartment vs. a new apartment,) users had a much easier time accomplishing the tasks asked of them, and had a better understanding of ROOM8’s capabilities.

Design

COLORS

When ROOM8 was first developed we hired an outside team to provide the branding, which lead to our blue color and logo. For this rendition we decided to keep the logo as is, but a few other secondary colors to help users navigate through the different sections of the app. For example, the green color let users know they were viewing available properties listed on ROOM8, blue let users know they were in the original screens, the purple let users know they were in insurance, etc.