Roomable

Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Link
Describe your project (max 150 words)

Building and maintaining a healthy roommate dynamic can be difficult. Whether it’s confronting your friend about taking out the trash or trying to communicate with a randomly assigned roommate who’s never around, Roomable is here to help! Our app is designed to help facilitate a positive roommate experience. By setting up user and dorm profiles to help roommates better understand each other’s living habits, assign the tasks that need to be completed, and facilitate conversations to resolve conflicts, we can create a peaceful and suitable co-living environment on campus.

Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) We started with a group brainstorming session to explore the variety of problems undergraduate students might face that design can alleviate. After 1 hour, we narrowed down to 2 key themes: student housing and academics, followed by another hour of envisioning all sorts of solutions. We agreed on tackling the student housing problem.

With that, we conducted discovery interviews, surveys, and literature review of sources like Yik Yak #roommaterant and Reddit’s threads related to student housing. Our dataset of over 20 respondents reflects a diverse demographic, experience with housing, and experience with conflicts.

15-minute sessions of discovery interview are conducted with 2 sophomores, 2 juniors, and 2 seniors to gain personal insights into the student housing process and experience.

Link to the survey questions + results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WmfnWlKrq7NLOh0pMnD6pl8-2lC1MB63LlKZ4A7G8ms/edit#gid=714797842

Link to user interview questions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NyXuCS9q9egGZpDVh7pD0fxTtJ0QfMI25xo5fZGSgO8/edit

Although we asked about both the on-campus and off-campus experiences in our survey, we decided to narrow down our efforts into focusing on the on-campus housing experience. This helped us to create a more focused app that wouldn’t require additional features to accommodate both types of housing (dorms! vs apartments).

Summarized Challenges: Problems can arise with living habits that were unexpected until rooming together Hard to confront friends/people you know about issues Hard to act as mediator of problems between suitemates Roommate dislike Random room selection forms undetailed/not reliable in finding roommates Unaligned sleep schedules

From our discovery interview and survey results, we decided that the biggest pain points that we could potentially address through a solution were: Roommate matching questionnaire/system not creating suitable matches Focused on solving conflict by creating a better matching system Addressing and solving roommate conflicts + maintaining shared living space Focused on resolving conflict between friends/current roommates

We developed a problem statement that encompasses what we hope to address and focus on through our design.

Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words)

Visual Design Choices:

We chose Poppins as our typeface because of its sleek, modern, and clarity even in small sizes on a mobile device. It also has a very contemporary aesthetic that fits with the college student vibe and aesthetic. We chose a color palette that also elicited the simplistic and modern feel. It’s also easy on the eyes, and a visually appealing combination of colors that help guide the user through the app. With mostly dark blue text, navy buttons, and yellow/light blue accents and boxes, there is a very consistent feel throughout the entire user flow for the registration and set up. For the home page, there is much more vibrance and variation and color that makes the app pop a bit more in comparison to the tutorial/set up stage.

Information Architecture: The organization and structure of our content has changed a lot through our design process. We also had a major pivot in the middle where we decided to focus more on the conflict resolution and roommate living features, rather than an initial idea to have roommate match-making. Because of this, we were able to delve much deeper into the root of the problem, which is that college students struggle with having clear boundaries with their roommates and maintaining this relationship.

Our app is divided into 4 major sections: -Sign-up -Providing many easy sign-up options (phone number, gmail, apple id) to encourage people to create an account -Password/account creation to help international students who may switch phone numbers -Provides a bit of information about the app, can also be personalized to the user -Create personal profile -Questionnaire made specifically to better understand living preferences -Much more in-depth than typical school roommate matching -Understanding preferences is extremely helpful when resolving any arising conflicts -Create dorm profile -Enter dorm information, that may be unique to each roommate group -Rules and assigned tasks to make sure important things get done -Able to add roommates to the dorm -Home/App navigation -Menu bar on the bottom to access the most used functions of the app -Home Page -Conflicts -Chat -Profile -Unique features to foster positive roommate relationships -Chat feature to encourage communication -Announcements if being held accountable publicly works best for user/roommates to remember doing chores,
-Conflict chats, to help facilitate difficult conversations with access to RAs/support if necessary. -Alerts to remind users of important times, notes, and misc. Items

We focused on the initial user experience for this app, and how it would look to begin using the app from the very start.