Team:

Erik Soriano

Xueer Xia

Role:

UX designer

Timeline:

Fall 2022

Tools:

Figma

Google JamBoard

Summary

An application made for int’l students to find a roommate and a place to live, either separately or simultaneously. Introducing an innovate and forward-thinking way to communicate living preferences by allowing users to put their living style habits by using images alongside text; they can select images for aspects of the living experience such as smoking habits, party habits, cleanliness, visitors, social habits, study habits and more. The intent of the app is to give users a clearer snapshot of their roommate options first, so they can get a better idea of who they can message to save each other time.

Objectives

  • Identify the main problems and struggles that students face when moving to a new country and finding a place to live and/or roommates

  • Based on the data synthesis, use findings to create a solution for users to help them find roommates more easily

Our process: The Design Thinking Method

Introduction

Going to college is already a big and overwhelming decision for many students, but for Int’l students who decide to study abroad, this experience includes a new set of challenges to overcome; from learning a new language, to learning new rules and laws, to adapting to a new city, lifestyle and learning to become independent, aside from their school duties, and of course…finding somewhere to call home.

Our team decided to figure out exactly which is the most difficulty part for expats after getting accepted into their dream school, so we started with generative research methods to understand the student experience.

Our Predictions

Our original assumptions were that students mainly cared about finding affordable housing options, as well as short distances to school and also that they would like a platform where they could ask questions to other students about how to adapt to a new culture/country.

01 Empathize

Generative Research

  • 10 1-on1 interviews (remote/moderated)

  • 1 online survey (remote/unmoderated)

  • Participants were recruited from countries such as China, Singapore, Norway and the US.

Participants by Age

Participants by Education Level

Original Problem Statement:

“How might we innovate on the experience of finding a place to live for Int’l students”

Synthesis

We gathered the most important data points from our 10 user interviews, and organized them on a different page, 1 per participant. We also extracted the most important takeaways to help us identity themes and clustering later on. These are some examples of the affinity diagrams that helped us narrow down our path to choose an area to innovate.

Insights

  • Students seek information online on social media outlets such as Wechat, facebook, etc.

  • Students seek housing + roommates online

  • Students who prefer lower prices have to worry about furniture & utilities

  • Students do not trust the information they find online, due to fear of scamming

  • There is uncertainty when trying to secure a place to live, especially when students do it alone

  • Students struggle to find roommates they can trust

  • Students struggle to find housing alone, so they opt to find roommates to facilitate the house seeking experience

  • Expats look for roommates at the last minute before traveling abroad.

02 Define

User Personas

After our data synthesis and scoping down our higher level findings to focus on the opportunity to innovate on the roommate seeking experience, we developed two personas: Candy Jones & Jenna Sanders, who represent our two user groups, both are International students who have different motivations for finding a roommate. They helped us stay on track and having a good reference point when developing our solutions and ideas.

User Journey Maps

By empathizing with both personas, and getting an idea of their journey from getting accepted into the school, all the way to arriving at their new city, we plotted all the different pain points and satisfactory moments of their experience, the most pain points occurred when browsing online to meet people to live with, since there is so much uncertainty and bias from previous bad experiences, etc. This was our opportunity.

Reframed Problem Statement:

“How might we facilitate the experience of finding roommates before finding a place to live by allowing users to connect and get to know each other first?”

03 Ideation

Ideation: Sketches

During the ideation process, we considered different ways to communicate someone’s personality and living habits beyond words, we thought of solutions such as a Roblox-like experience where users play a game to simulate what it’s like living together, as well as a virtual reality experience that also takes players to several scenarios where they choose to interact with roommate (or not), but we realized having to have a headset would not be so easy for most people worldwide, so we needed a simpler, more ubiquitous solution: a mobile app experience.

After deciding to move forward with the mobile app experience to seek roommates, we needed to innovate on more ways to communicate information if users did not write bios, or for those users who are more visual and do not read text otherwise. We felt confident that our idea to use icons and visuals to communicate words was not commonly done in current apps that cater to international students.

Low-fi Wireframes

After the ideation phase, our team decided to go with a mobile app experience, since students are more likely to seek information and find roommates on their phone. We begin with sketches, followed by the low-fidelity wireframes to present to our stakeholder team. We thought of including at least two modes: one for seeking roommates, and another one for seeking a place to live and a roommate almost simultaneously to save users’ time.

04 Prototype

Hi-fidelity Wireframes

Each mode will be characterized by their main color:

  • Green for roommate mode

  • Red for housing + roommate mode

  • Blue for housing only mode

Only some accents will include the colors though, most of the user interface will be a light theme with dark text to not distract the users with too many colors. The user starts by signing up, until they have to make a selection as to which ‘mode’ they want to be in. If they choose roommate only, they start by selecting from a list of preferences about what they want in a roommate, then they press ‘find roommates’ button and are taken to a list of results that show the most compatible matches at the top. Users are free to go back and change parameters around to get updated results, and after they see options they like, they can favorite them, check out their profile and eventually message the person(s) to potentially become roommates.

05 Test

Summary of issues found

  • Low saliency in typography (font-size)

  • Bad color contrast

  • Too much information being shown at the same time

  • Lack of a main page/dashboard

  • Low saliency of main action button placement

  • Not clear way to switch between roommate mode, and secondary modes

Methods: Subjects

  • Three (3) participants were used for the short study

  • 2 Female

  • 1 Male

  • All participants were graduating students

  • All participants were proficient or above average level with technology

  • One participant was an end user (int’l student who sought roommates online)

Final Version: myRoomie App

A picture is worth a thousand words.

People can learn more by seeing images, than by simply reading words on profiles (sometimes people don’t even write bios, so it’s hard to get an idea of someone’s personality). The intent of the app is to give users a clearer snapshot of their roommate options first, so they can get a better idea of who they can message to save each other time.

Main Target Audience:

  • Int’l students who want to find a roommate to have an easier and better school experience

  • Students who’ve had roommates before or those who’ve never had a roommate but are open to the idea

Key Features:

  • Ability to select from ‘levels’ of living preference instead of binary options such as clean/messy

  • Ability to join optional living simulator that creates prompts for conversation regarding how people would share common area

  • Ability to find place to live simultaneously as finding roommate options

Reflection

By doing user research and empathizing with international students, our team was able to innovate on the experience of finding a roommate, and a place to live, by taking on a more visual approach to how roommate candidates are presented on a mobile app. At first, we had some difficulty trying to scope down to which aspect of the international student experience was the most challenging to users, but by having a clear methodology when interviewing users, we were able to uncover and narrow down our focus. The main takeaway from this project, was to not assume that people only care about money when it comes to finding a place to live, sometimes they prioritize safety, comfort and trust.

It is also important to understand that culture plays a role when designing a product for int’l students, especially when seeking roommates, since many people usually prefer those with similar culture and beliefs, but others also are open to roommates from a different background to exchange culture and languages, etc. A future consideration for this project would be to interview people from more countries, as well as do more usability studies to assess whether the app succeeds at reducing the uncertainty gap when seeking other students to live with.