URoom: Designing a Roommate Finding App for College Students
Timeline
December 2023 - February 2024
Context
Personal Project
Role
UX Designer
Team
2 UX Designers
Step 1: Empathize
The Problem
The Problem
Every year, college students go through the process of looking for housing and roommates. If you were ever a college student, you would know the stress that comes with figuring out your living situation, especially if you don’t know many people at your college. As a freshman, I remember finding it very difficult to find a roommate without knowing anyone yet.
At the University of Rochester, there is unfortunately no university-provided platform for finding roommates. Many students may resort to using random roommate selection where the university randomly pairs you with a roommate. However, this can result in roommate compatibility issues.
Another aspect of housing at the University of Rochester is living in suite-style apartments, where you need a group of people big enough to qualify for housing. This results in students having groups that are too small for the apartment, resulting in the need for more people to join their group.
Many students find roommates through social media like Instagram or Facebook. However, there are potential safety risks as it’s hard to tell if the other person is authentic and trustworthy.
Our goal is to make the roommate-finding process for college students easier by removing the safety risks of using other platforms, and by making it easier to find compatible roommates that match their lifestyle and housing preferences at their university.
Step 2: Define
Competitive Analysis
Competitive Analysis
Competitive Analysis in Figjam
Step 2: Define
Needfinding
Step 2: Define
Personas
Personas
Based on needfinding results, the following persona was made with user needs in mind.
Step 2: Define
Affinity Diagram
Affinity Diagram
In order to better understand our interview responses, we created an affinity diagram, sorting the notes taken during interviews.
Interview responses were sorted by the interviewees’ roommate preferences, and their roommate search process.
Participants mainly cited living habits (such as sleeping schedules, cleanliness, smoking etc.) and personality traits (like respectful, and friendly) as important factors in choosing a roommate
When searching for a roommate, participants cited differences in how they went about choosing roommates during freshman year and their upperclassmen years.
Affinity Diagram
Key Insights:
Step 3: Ideation
How Might We Statements
How Might We and Dot Voting
We brainstormed a list of "How Might We" statements to help our brainstorming process for potential features to include in our roommate finding app. We used dot voting to sort through and pick out the most popular feature ideas.
Dot Voting
Brainstormed Features:
Step 3: Ideation
Information Architecture
Information Architecture
Using our brainstormed features, we mapped out the information architecture of the roommate finding app. This included the Explore page, that included a filtering button for profiles, and a list of recommended profiles for the user, a profile page where users can showcase their housing preferences and information, a chat page for chatting with potential roommates, and a favorites page for liked profiles.
Information Architecture showing the 4 main pages: Explore Page, Profile Page, Chat Page and Favorites Page
Step 4: Prototype
Prototyping
Prototyping
We started by creating low fidelity prototypes of pages from our information architecture. Then we established the design system, such as standardizing button designs, icon set, color palette, and other important components of Uroom. Finally, we incorporated the design system into our prototypes to create the final high fidelity mockups.
