Enhancing the experience of connecting and living with roomates
Roommate solutions in Perú
Overview
As rental costs become more expensive in Perú, young people are looking towards shared accommodations as a way to reduce living costs while also getting more independence and better living conditions.
Goal
Understand users pains points throughout their experience in order to discover services or products to help them.
Outcome
A tested mobile prototype for one of the key problems for the taget user.
My role
Designer lead. Product strategy, user research and testing, UX/UI design.
Methods
In-depth interviews, affinity map, prototypes, storyboard, benchmark, user testing.
Tools
Figma
Year
2018
Research
The initial approach was focused on exploration. We ran face to face in-depth interviews with rent owners and living space seekers to learn more about their jobs to be done and how they solved them, understanding about pain points and opportunities in the process. We classified the journey into three main phases:
- Looking for new roommates.
- Living (and getting along) with roommates.
- Managing expenses and chores with roommates.
Focusing on our first finding, we understood what our target users were having pains with: knowing who they would be compatible with, being able to trust the people they were talking to and not wanting to spend a lot of time finding a roommate.
We found that people were mostly asking friends or using social media within their circles to solve their needs. We wanted to know if we could build an app that could expand their search without any concerns. We did a competitive analysis and benchmark, in order to see how other apps were solving these problems.
We found that while there are alternatives, they are focused on apartment-hunting. These solutions are simple lists of rooms available. While that helps people find a place to live with a roommate, it does not aid them in finding a GOOD roommate.
Prototyping
Having completed this research, we decided on core features to build a quick prototype and validate the idea. We wanted to answer the following questions:
- Would our target users find the application useful to find good roommates?
- Would our target users trust the application enough to use it?
Mockups created for the iOS prototype.
We recruited 8 people to test the prototype and get enough insights to know whether the app would be worth pursuing or if we needed to pivot our idea.
Key learnings
Don't get attached to ideas
This project had started as a Real Estate Listing website. While the initial idea had a lot of potential and was very interesting to the team, because of the current market and competition we decided to find a more niche solution. Understanding the context of the business, and surrounding ourselves with experts and mentors on the topic helped us make this decision.