What is an ideal roommate?
Before anything else, I needed to understand what makes up an ideal roommate.
After interviewing 5 people (aged 23 to 28), it became clear to me what traits are important when considering living with someone:
- finding someone who could potentially become a friend
- preferably an acquaintance of your friends or family
- a person with a similar lifestyle to yours
- someone with good communication skills and problem-solving ability
- someone with the same expectations regarding the routine and relationship
It was also evident that, for many people, the roommate is more important than the location of the apartment.
“The roommate is more important than the location. Living with a bad roommate, but in a good place would not make it up for me.” — quote from one of the interview
Where do people look for roommates?
In my interviews, I also noticed that most people find roommates
- as indications from friends or family
- posting on Facebook groups
- on specialized websites, such as Yuca here in Brazil
Even though they are effective, all these methods have issues.
When talking about Facebook, it was said that the quality of the photos/text and the moment it is posted affect significantly the outcomes of the ad.
In Yuca’s case, people talked about the fees the platform charges, making it much more expensive to rent a room there.
And there is also the chance of finding people via some friend or family member, but it isn’t always possible to find a roommate this way.
If it is so hard to find a good roommate, why do people do it anyway?
It seemed important to understand the reasons why people look for a person to share an apartment with.
In my research, two of these reasons caught my attention:
- BUDGET CONTROL: with a roommate, it is easier to have a cheaper lifestyle while living in your desired part of town
- COMPANIONSHIP: many interviewees cited the roommate as a company for activities, which became even more notable during the pandemic.
But what is essential?
I then decided to understand the essential items when looking for an ideal roommate.
Using a value proposition canvas I mapped out customer jobs, gains e pains.
This way it was easier to get to a problem statement I could focus on.
How might we help young people find roommates (preferably within their circle of acquaintances) with attractive ads, that show their expectations in an easy way and with minimal personal exposition
Focusing on finding solutions for users’ pains
With this in mind, I decided to list users’ pains and think about ways to solve them:
“the quality of your ad affects the people you find”
The proposed solution needed to simplify the task of creating ads, so every user could have an equal chance of finding an ideal roommate, instead of only ads that were beautifully written or photographed having the best outcomes. In platforms such as Facebook, the way you write your ad impacts profoundly the amount and the quality of the replies you get, so it was important to increase the chance of everyone finding a great roommate.
“how to seem cool and interesting without overexposing yourself?”
It’d be interesting to make it able for users to tell a little bit about themselves without necessarily having to write a paragraph about them or posting personal photos. One option would be to create tags that people could select with information about their personality, such as “vegetarian”, “pet lover”, “smoker”, etc.
“people have different expectations about what it means to be clean and organized”
Subjective themes, such as “what does organized mean to you” are a little bit harder to be approached. Two possibilities would be:
- having a questionnaire on the user’s profile with questions such as these
- allowing users to chat on the platform so they can clear this type of information themselves
“people lie about their personalities”
This, such as the previous item, is a little trickier to be solved. I believe, though, that the “tags” idea where people can select topics that relate to them might help solve this issue.
And which features would add value to the solution?
Going back to the value proposition canvas, I took the topics that would add value and started thinking about ways to incorporate them into a solution.
“setting clear rules and having a good relationship”
When you look for a place on Airbnb, the house rules are written in the ad description. It’d be interesting to do something similar in this project.
“finding someone with friends in common”
This reminded me of LinkedIn and how it is possible to see if anybody on the platform is a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd-degree contact. Maybe setting an integration with some social network could make this viable for this solution. It’d be important to validate this possibility with the development team, of course.
“finding someone with a similar personality, who could become a friend”
This topic is very close to some described on the pain points. This time, again, I believe that having tags that people could use to describe themselves would help users find roommates that better matched their profiles.
Prioritizing features
With all this information, I started wondering what to consider when thinking about a solution. From the data I had till this point, it was evident that using a MOSCOW matrix would help me define my priorities.
It seemed interesting for me to come up with a solution that focused on finding the ideal roommate, but that wouldn’t necessarily intermediate payment processes and contracts, this is why this feature was put in the WON’T HAVE column.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel
The next step was looking for apps that could be of inspiration for the chosen features. Some of the apps that caught my attention were:
Airbnb
- all ads look the same
- there’s a list of facilities and house rules
- there’s a map with the location of the house
Bumble
- all profiles look the same
- tags with information about users’ personalities
- integration with Spotify
Landscaping helped me visualize existing ways to solve similar problems in different apps. Using visual solutions that users are already used to shortens the learning curve and adds value to the product.
Now it was time to understand how to actually use this in a solution and start studying the use cases.
Understanding use cases
When we talk about finding an ideal roommate, there are normally 2 possible use cases:
- a person is offering an available room
- a person is looking for a room
Both these people need a profile on the app, that can be pretty much the same, with the difference being that one of them is SEARCHING and the other is OFFERING a room.
It was also important to think about the ad, and how it would be connected to the profile of the user who is offering the place. To make this clear, I decided to draw a user flow, taking into consideration my findings that the roommate is more important than the location of the apartment.
Drawing the user flow brought to light some things I needed to keep in mind, such as the items on the navbar. Taking into consideration that one person either looks for OR offers a room, these two profiles would have slightly different views of the app.
Sketching a solution
Knowing what information would be necessary on each screen, as well as which items should be on the main navigation, it was time to understand the best way to place them on the screen.
I started with a mid-fi prototype, to understand if the flows were making sense and if they contemplated all steps in the search for an apartment.
Putting the prototype to the test
I showed the mid-fi prototype to three people that hadn’t taken part in the interviews and got very constructive feedback:
- since the app focuses on finding people with similar interests, it’d be good to have some information about the person offering the room in the card on the home screen.
- search filters would also be a good addition, so users can see ads within their budget and also set up some preferences such as seeing only ads created by women or etc.
Refining the screens
I implemented some of the suggestions I got and, once satisfied with the result, I worked on the screens to get to a hi-fi prototype.
Since there was no specification about colors/fonts or a design system to consult, I used the company’s color (orange) and also white, gray, and black.
The idea of having a clean UI matched the app’s goal, where the experience should focus on what is being offered, with the interface interfering as little as possible.
I also made a simple working prototype, that showed the flow to look for an apartment and attached the Figma file to the case.
After all, did it solve the users’ pains?
To know that, we would need to do some usability testing.
I believe that bringing the users closer by using profiles that show what their interests are, is very positive.
When I looked back at my interview notes and checked what was said about “what is important when looking for a roommate”, I could say it was possible to find a solution to almost every item I had written down.
With the tags, it became easier to:
- find someone who could potentially become a friend
- a person with a similar lifestyle to yours
- someone with the same expectations regarding the routine and relationship
With the integration with Instagram it became possible to find:
- preferably an acquaintance of your friends or family
The one item that could not be solved was helping users find:
- someone with good communication skills and problem-solving ability
Conclusion
In the end, I believe that the proposed solution turned out pretty interesting. Yes, there are details that would need to be better studied in case this app was a real product, but during the ideation process, I tried to be as faithful to the research outcomes as possible.
I wonder if this would be a feasible product, when taking into consideration the business perspective of a company, after all, the contracts and payments were left out of the solution, and including ads from real state agencies or something related would go in the opposite direction of the idea of bringing people closer to help them find better roommates.