Roomie Whales

Overview

Roomie Whales is an app developed to help international students find roommates and apartments. The app asks users to fill in a personality quiz to find possible roommates and apartments based on common interests.

The goal of this app is to help international students settle down by matching them with suitable roommates and apartments based on their quiz results and filters.

Role

Adobe XD prototyping
Interviewing
Writing reports
Conducting Research

Duration

3 Month

July-October 2022

See Prototype

Understanding the Problem

Our situation of use aims to solve the problem of settling in a new environment for international students. Most international students want to settle down as soon as possible but do not know where to start. There are many factors when finding a suitable apartment such as position, safety, price, facilities, and roommates. Our team conducted interviews with different stakeholders to find out the problems stakeholders (international students, parents and agencies) are facing.

Some possible problems we found out from the interviews are:

International Students often unable to inspect the apartment and see if there are any problems with the apartment. This leads to a lot of students turning to agencies to choose a house for them, which causes agencies to raise their prices very high and hide some of the apartment flaws

Roommates who has completely different habits and personalities to each other will often cause conflict. As a lot of students choose to share a room with roommates to reduce the cost, but several of our the international students we interviewed said they moved out due to arguement with roommates.

It can be very useful amongst international students is seeing reviews from previous international students sharing their experiences to help others. Currently, there are no apps that helps international students solve these problems so we believe that there is a potential to develop an app to help new international students.

Rich Picture

Wireframing Design Ideas

We initially generated 5 design ideas in Adobe XD using low-fi prototypes. They are generating renting plans for international students according to their situation, show the safety rating of each apartment, roommate matching, inspection on behalf of offshore students, and share living experiences.

Idea 1: Generate renting plans for international students according to their situation

Idea 2: Show the safety situation of an apartment

Idea 3: Roommate Matching

Idea 3: Roommate Matching

Final Design Idea

After conducting some interviews with our stakeholders. Most participants seem to prefer the roommate matching function over others. So we decided to do wireframe of the quiz first before adding any styles.

Basic Information

Final Mockup

The final mockup aims to help users find roommate by allowing them to chat with possible roommates from the list that was recommended to them based on their quiz results. It consists of 4 steps:

Step 1: Fill out personality Quiz

Step 3: Chat with roommate

Step 2: Find a roommate and start chatting

Step 3: Sign the contract

Validating the design

We conducted usability evaluation to with our stakeholders to test the value of our design. The aim is to see if there are any problems that is not discovered during the developing phase. During testing, I asked the user to use the app mock up and voice their thinking process out aloud.

The usability session revealed both good and positive results. The positive results we got were that most all of the users completed each section of the app very quickly since the app's interface follows the tradition structure of most online friend apps. The negatives were:

The quiz part uses inconsistent shapes for different options, (Fig 1) it consists of both rectangle and circles.
The tag option is choatic, (Fig 2) it displays as one chunk rather than grouped into categories.
There are not enough options available. Some users claim that their desired option was not listed in the available options. However, we also need to consider if adding more options would be more difficult for the machine to analyse.
The matches need to be displayed in descending order. (Fig 3) Currently, the matches are not displayed in any order, this may confuses the user as they are used to seeing descending order in most apps.
Percentage lower than 60% does not need to be displayed, (Fig 4) as it might be too low to share similar interest with the user.

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Fig 1

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Fig 2

Fig 3

Fig 4

Results & Takeaways

Overall, the tutors seems to be impressed with our presentation of the Roomie Whales. Their feedback were taht they like the idea and would solve many problems once it hit the market.

The key takeaways from this project are:

Consistency matters in any type of design. Small consistency such as the use of shapes may appear inharmonious to the users.

It is important to follow traditional design that are found in most apps. Roomie Whales was easy to use because the interface is like any other online friend app that users are used seeing. So is important for the matches to be displayed in descending order.