City Roomie

A roommate finding app that helps NYC residents find roommates and listings all-in-one platform

Project Type

End-To-End App Design

Duration

14 Weeks

Tools

Figma, Miro, and Optimal Workshop

Project Background

Renting is vastly more popular than owning in NYC. When the majority of the people living in NYC are renting, it becomes more essential for the search process to be easier and convenient.

Understanding the Problem Space Around Renting in NYC

My Assumptions

To validate the product idea, I assumed that finding a home for renters in New York City is often a stressful and time consuming process.

What is the Problem?

To further understand the problem space around the renting market in NYC I conducted user interviews and secondary research.

From the chart on the right, we see that over ⅔ of the residents living in NYC are renting, which highlights the need to make the search process easier and convenient.

Conducted Competitor Analysis to Understand the Landscape in the Market

It was important for me to analyze our competitor in that market to understand and identify gaps in the industry.

Through competitor research, we found four competitors in the renting market that provide trust and reliable content. This helped me identify gaps in the market as well as features that users might expect.

Key Takeaways:

Large user base
Good content
Sharp product development
Strong mobile presence

Empathize Through Research

The interviews focused on understanding users’ experiences with moving and their motivations.

I asked questions like:

Tell me about your experience with moving to a new place
What do you look for when searching for a new place
When you are researching certain areas to live, what are you researching about that area?

"I only used Facebook to find roommates. I only say that because I don't know of an alternative outside of knowing someone that just happens to be moving in the same place."

"Moving was kind of stressful. And it was kind of it sucked being on a timetable of having to move within a certain time period."

"It's really expensive to live in New York, if you rent a a studio or one bedroom by yourself. So you need roommate, but it's hard to match with roommates with are interested in the same listings and budget as you."

"Things go really quickly. So you can't necessarily be patient because if the apartment is good, the turnaround time of it being listed, viewed and rented sometimes can be as little as a week, sometimes even shorter than that."

After conducting the user interviews, my assumptions about finding a home for NYC residents was a stressful and time consuming process was proven true.

Organize the Research Findings

To quickly cluster the large amount of information I’ve obtained from the user interviews, I utilized affinity maps to sort different observations and ideas. Which allowed me to organize the insights into opportunity areas.

Other affinity map board:

Experience with moving
Reasons to move
Criteria when researching
likes/wants in a real estate site
Tools used

Problem Statement

How might we make it easier for people to search for
like-minded roommates

Synthesize my Research Findings

Gathering all the research we’ve done so far, we created a persona. The persona helped us better understand our target audience and make design decisions accordingly. Jill is a mixture of interviewees. She lives in the hustle and bustle life that is NYC. Like many of the residents of NYC, she has roommates to offset the cost of rent. However, she often gets into conflict due to different standards of living.

Ideate and Prioritize Solutions

While brainstorming possible solutions, I created a feature roadmap to help me determine which features to focus on for a minimal viable product (MVP). Doing so allowed me to get a better idea of what the product should look like. I wanted to create a site that combines the functionalities of a rent listing site and a roommate finding site.

How did I determine what feature to focus on?

After much thought, I decided to focus on creating a platform to help people find roommates and listings all-in-one platform. Since there are already very well-established platforms to find listings, the focus for the MVP will focus on finding a roommate.

From Ideas to Wireframes

Creating an intuitive flow for testing

To help me understand how the information and content of the website will be structured, I created a sitemap of where each piece of content will be located.

Creating user flows allowed me to understand the journey my user will take to complete a task. In this case, I created one flow to showcase the path the user will take in our product to find a roommate.

Designing the Application

After creating the user flow, I sketched out and created low-fidelity wireframes of key pages that were important to my users’ journey. This also helped me to see a clear overview of the page structure, layout, information architecture and the user flow. By doing so allows me to better visualize key components of what to incorporate for each page.

How did I determine what feature to focus on?

Defining Brand Identity and Visual Design System

I developed the brand identity as well as the visual design system to ensure consistency and cohesion across the screens. Some keywords that best describe City Roomie are: reliable, trustworthy, modern and accurate. I kept these words in mind as I designed the logo and brand identity.

High Fidelity Designs

After developing the brand identity and design system, I created high-fidelity designs using the brand guidelines to bring my designs to life and prepare for the next steps: prototyping and testing. Below you'll see key screens for the sign-up flow and chat flow.

Putting it to the Test

Usability test

After the prototype was finished, we ran a round of usability tests. As the goal of this project was to create a platform to help people find roommates easier, we recruited 4 participant who fit into our persona to test the prototype doing the following tasks:

Sign up and match with a roommate
Match with a female roommate with a budget of $1600
Find a replacement roommate

‍

100%

of users completed
the usability test

90%

of users felt the
platform was intuitive

74%

of users felt satisfied
with the platform

94%

of users would recommend
this platform to others

Visit Prototype

Concerns & Suggestions

"In the filters, I would imagine a listing of all the communities and areas or zones that are going to call it in Brooklyn to show up, or like an option that says all."

"The heart on the profile image is confusing if it means to save their profile."

When I saw unmatched, I thought it meant I didn't match with them. Like, we didn't connect.

"I'm not sure if people would like seeing that they got rejected, maybe a different word instead of that?"

With the data from our usability test, we prioritized the data using an impact-effort matrix. Which help us prioritize items based on their impact to the user and the level of effort it’d take to implement them.

Making Improvements

Final Thoughts & Next Steps

With a strict timeline, the focus of this design project fell on finding a roommate. While there were only a few screens created, I would continue building out the remaining screens based on my user flow and explore the other items on my impact-effort matrix in the high impact & high effort section. This includes 1) adding NYC neighborhoods as filters so that users can narrow down their roommate searches and 2) updating the verbiage of “Unmatched” on the chat page.