April 2019
Roomer Mobile App
Running a design sprint on a roommate searching app for Gen Z-ers
Deliverables
Research, user flows, product map, hi-fi mocks.
Background
College students, believe it or not, have a lot of responsibilities. The last thing they want to think about is finding roommates and a place to live for the years to come.
So as a passion project, my co-designer and I ran a two-man (variation of a) design sprint, which lasted 3 days, on a roommate searching app to ease some of the pains that college students face.
"I’m scared that people aren’t who they say they are once I start living with them."
– Theresa, Sophomore
Our “Expert” Interviews
To get a deeper understanding of students’ struggles when looking for a place to live, my co-designer and I spoke to 5 students from UCLA. From these interviews, we found that it was really difficult for students to
1. Find other people looking for an apartment/roommates that had similar preferences as them.
2. Discern what type of lifestyle other people have before actually living with them.
The Sprint Question
“How might we design a platform for college students that would make the roommate-searching process more fun and convenient?”
User Journey Mapping
Our five user interviews enabled us to synthesize our research into an empathy map and user journey.
Lightning Demos
Jumping into our ideation process, we first looked at the current methods of roommate-searching to analyze both the pain points and the successes.
Searching on Facebook
Many students use closed network Facebook groups to look for roommates because they can verify profiles, secure groups via school emails, easily message others, and share profiles with their friends or current roommates. However, Facebook groups aren’t specialized for activities such as roommate searching, making it difficult to parse through information.
Roommate & Apartment Searching Apps
While less popular, roommate searching apps such as Roomster provided much more streamlined information and allowed for quicker searching. However, apps like these aren’t usually closed-network, which can invite scammers and untrustworthy folks.
Dating Apps
We also looked at dating apps that millennials and Gen Z-ers use to draw inspiration. Tinder and Hinge’s swiping feature allowed for quick searching. Additionally, they featured more playful profiles to help people get to know each other using things such as fun prompts to answer.
Sketches
Moving forward, we quickly sketched some solutions to ideate through big questions such as onboarding, profile creation, roommate matching, and messaging.
From our sketches, we voted on the features that we thought should be prioritized in the prototype.
Storyboarding
The prioritization of features made it a lot easier for us to figure out the steps of the storyboard and what we wanted to add into our prototype.
Final Prototype
Onboarding Screens
Home Screen
Messaging
Conclusion
This project gave me my first exposure to design sprints! It was a really eye-opening experience in terms of being able to make such rapid progression in a short amount of time and reach new levels of team alignment (even though there was only two of us). Due to our short timeline, however, we were not able to test the prototype (which, I know, is the most important part).
In hindsight, I wish we would have followed the real design sprint process more closely in terms of the exercises we did to gain more meaningful insights into the “why” behind the process. Regardless, it was a great learning experience and I had fun!