“The room/roommates-hunting doesn’t happen often to me, but I feel frustrated every time when I’m doing it.”
— one of my interviewee, millennial
BACKGROUND
Finding a place to live and roommates outside of your friend group is a lengthy and frustrating experience. People turn to Facebook Groups and Craigslist only to spend weeks or months in search of compatible options.
Roomi is a shared housing platform focused on creating a safer and easier way to find room rentals, sublets & roommates.
PROBLEM
By providing ways to connect room rentals and potential roommates at the same time, Roomi saves movers' time from sifting through housing listings, asking for/sending strangers social media profiles and initiating conversations with people that normally lead to dead-ends. However, it still requires users to manually search for potential "match".
No relevant feedbacks about rooms/roommates after giving personal information during the onboarding process, movers can hardly get a sense of “matched” until they set the filter on the sidebar from the homepage.
SOLUTION
WHAT I'M SHIPPING - THE NEW ONBOARDING FOR ROOMI iOS
HOW I GOT THERE?
Process & Project Timeline Planning
Understanding the Current Experience
I sought to understand what the existing experience of finding a room/ roommate was like by interviewing 3 friends of mine. I deliberately selected my interviewees who have different ethnicities in order to find patterns.
While asking for roommates at the apartment building you’d like to live in seems like the logical thing to do, unfortunately it won’t get you very far. Nearly 100% of these apartment communities distance themselves from roommate-matching so Facebook Groups/ Wechat and Craigslist have become the most popular way to find roommates.
I found Facebook Groups and Craigslist to be crowded with new posts in the 50’s per-day in Chicago Downtown Area alone. With no way to narrow down location within Facebook Groups, users have the tedious and time-intensive task of sifting through dozens or hundreds of posts from people looking for roommates.
Craigslist offered a way to search by location but offered little in the way of assuring safety or showing personality fit. Craigslist posts offer zero photos of the roommate and minimal text about him/her, but ask repliers to send links to their Facebook and/or LinkedIn profiles. This kind of information-sharing asymmetry was uncomfortable for most of the people we spoke with.
However, alternative apps like Roomi, Room8, and Roomster who are aiming to do all the works at the same time are not on the majority's radar.
All my interviewees are heavily relying on message platforms to search for room/roommates and sending messages
Understanding the Landscape
Key Insights
Persona
Solution Scenario
Jack needs to move-in within a very short period of time. As his current anxiety and frustration levels are high, he can't afford to go through FB Groups and experience another dead-end conversation.
So he decided to give Roomi a try.
Jack's onboarding flow
Alice likes to plan ahead. With plenty of time for her to spot her next like-minded roommate, she wants to explore all the possible options for room and roommate at the same time without feeling overwhelmed.
FB Groups and Craigslist seem like a good start but a bit of time-consuming, so Alice gives Roomi a go.
Alice's onboarding flow
User insights informed my big bets,
then those bets influenced my design decisions.
3 ROUNDS OF USER TESTINGS & ITERATIONS WITHIN 5 DAYS
With time constraints in my mind, I decided to start from mid-fi prototypes in order to maximize my interaction rounds to gain more feedback on the proposed onboarding solution. So I searched & distilled the design system from current Roomi iOS application(Version 4.4.5) to guide my mid-fi to final hi-fi mockups.
After receiving several critiques on accessibility for Roomi's current UI design, I made some twists and tried out some different hues to add more visual contrast to my final UI design. Here is a screenshot of the color I've been used to create my screens.
Credit to Sherry Wang, lead product designer at Roomi
MY ITERATION JOURNEY
Iteration Process Snapshots
Iterations & Designing Details
A few challenges during the design stage along with iterations of how I solved them and why.
WRAP UP
Special THANKS to all my friends that willing to share their room/roommate hunting experience with me and those who gave me critical feedback to help me iterating on my solution!
And of course, big thanks to Adobe to be such a good company!
Process Pictures