SpareRoom — UX Case Study

Group Concept Project | 2-week sprint

10 min readOct 23, 2019

The opportunity

SpareRoom would like to improve the search tools that enable hosts to find the most suitable flatmates and vice-versa.

SpareRoom also want hosts to be able to communicate with the tenants in an efficient way, as well as give them the ability to upload documents and information.

In addition they would like to give the users the opportunity to monitor the progress of their applications.

The team

I was part of a team of 4 designers, who analysed the user needs and the existing SpareRoom application as well as the competitor offerings.

My Role

In this project my main role covered the user research (user interview, affinity mapping), as well as the creation of user scenario, user flow and actively participating to the Design Studio Workshop. I also prepared the slides for the project presentation.

UX Tools

Software tools

Google Forms |Marvel | Adobe Photoshop | Sketch | Keynote

UX Process

In developing our solution we followed the double diamond process starting with the research, then synthesising the information obtained through the research phase. Once we had a clear and well-defined project, we proceeded with the ideation phase and eventually arrived to a working solution through the implementation of our ideas.

1. Discovery & Research

Competitive Analysis

We started our investigation on a possible solution initially through a competitive analysis. We took into consideration three of the major competitors websites, Badi, Ideal Flatmate, and GumTree.

Badi — has a very visual, simplified layout for their app which we found visually appealing
Idealflatmate — incorporates a quiz feature to identify potential flatmates — something we wanted to investigate further for SpareRoom
Gumtree — another popular app for advertising and finding rooms, however their visuals are very focused on advertising.

We also added a couple of non-direct competitors, Spot A Home and Open Rent and the result is shown in the table below.

We then looked at the key features of SpareRooms brief in more detail and went on to analyse the competitors main features.

One of the main key-findings was that none of SpareRoom competitors allow for documents to be uploaded into their system and therefore we thought that this could be something of a key differentiator that we could offer to our users.

After further digging into other features we found that only OpenRent seems to offer a way to monitor the progress of an application. Ideal Flatmate uses a feature to help match a user to a possible list of flatmates through a simple and engaging quiz.

My team and I then decided that we wanted to further investigate this latter feature.

Screener Survey

A screener survey was also posted on the General Assembly Slack Survey Channel.

The questionnaire was answered by 8 participants and helped me and my team to collect information about the potential user base.

The questions that we asked are the following:

Have you ever used SpareRoom before?
Do you currently live in a flat/house share?
Are you a property owner who has rented out your property in the past or is looking to rent out your property?
If you are a tenant, how do you go about finding a flatmate?
How old are you?

And the result is shown below:

User Interviews

In addition to the screening survey as a group we carried out 8 user interviews to better understand user frustrations and expectations. It was immediately clear that there were certain trends in the type of feedback that I was receiving from all of the users.

Insights:

2. Define: Research Synthesis

Affinity Mapping

After analysing all the data collected through the interviews and the screener survey, we decided to summarise the result into an affinity map.

With my team I worked on the affinity map to study trends and patterns

User Persona

As a team we initially created two different personas, one for the tenant and one for the landlord/host. However, given the time constraint and the data acquired, we decided to concentrate only on one of them, the tenant-host, as this appears to represent the vast majority of SpareRoom users (87.5% of the screened people live in rented accommodations.)

Meet Maya

Maya, 28, London, Consultant at a mid sized corporation

Personality
Independent, relaxed, outgoing but sometimes prefers privacy.

Behaviour/habits
Clean, tech savvy and active on social media, responds immediately to messages, slowly getting better at personal financial literacy.

Objectives

Find a nice flatmate to live with
Feel safe and comfortable at home
Live in a convenient location near public transport and a large supermarket
Be able to invite friends over to show off her home

Frustrations

Feeling unsafe going alone to a visit
Bad flatmates
Having to wait too long for replies from landlord
Flats in London becoming unavailable too fast

Empathy Map

In order to gain a deeper insight into our user’s base an empathy map was also created.

3. Develop: Ideation Phase

Experience Map

From the user persona and the empathy map we tried to imagine how Maya’s journey would be and what sort of tasks she would undertake in order to achieve her goals.

We defined her emotional state through the journey and added problem statement, hypothesis on how to provide a solution to her problems, and a way to measure the success.

Problem statement:

“Maya needs a quick and reliable way to find a flatmate to fill in the second bedroom in her London flat as her flatmate is moving out, and she cannot afford the rent on her own.”

Hypothesis:

“We believe that by simplifying the search function by providing a flatmate match option, Maya will feel less stressed and overwhelmed in her search for a flatmate. We will know this is true when Maya introduces her landlord to her new flatmate to sign the lease.”

Measuring success:

“On average it takes now two weeks from the time an ad is posted to the time it gets closed. With our solution we aim to reduce this to less than a week.”

Design Studio workshop

In this stage of the course I was introduced to the first Design Studio Workshop. I really enjoyed this brainstorming activity, which allowed me and my team to come up with several ideas.

We did 2 design studio iterations, that led us to the subsequent solution:

A simple 5-steps flatmate matching quiz would be implemented
The chat functionality would be improved
Upload of the user documents would be possible through the chat
A clearer progress monitoring system to be put in place

User Flow

Based on our solution we then wrote a scenario for Maya, and then we created the user flow.

Scenario: Maya shares a flat with a friend who has decided to move out with her boyfriend, and she now needs to find a replacement very quickly.

4. Deliver: Ideas Implementation

Quite happy with the result of our ideation phase, my team and I sketched a few paper wireframes that were used for testing our initial solution.

The sketches were iterated twice:

Clickable Prototype

The second one was turned into clickable prototype by uploading the wireframes in Marvel.

The usability testing was done with 5 users and led us to the following results:

2 out of 5 users found it confusing on how to add a document in the chat — guessed the ‘+’ icon
5 out of 5 users liked being able to communicate directly in app without giving away personal details
4 out of 5 users found original search icon for home page confusing, so we changed it to a home icon
5 out of 5 users thought the heart icon was too familiar. A user also commented: “You’re not going to date your flatmate!”

The picture above shows how the home page was improved through the two iterations:

The button Place was removed in the first iteration as well as the home icon and the favourite icon (heart) were both replaced with more suitable icons
The number of viewers was removed and the button My Ads was made more prominent in the second iteration

Mid-Fi and Hi-Fi Prototype

With the learnings that we had in the first two iterations we went on to create the Mid-Fi prototypes, which again was tested with 5 different users.

The feedback this time was more positive, but there were still some improvements that needed to be done. Below is the list of changes that were added from the Mid-Fi prototype to the Hi-Fi mock-up:

3 out of 5 users felt more options other than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ should be provided in quiz answer
4 out of 5 users said the skip option button could be at the top, rather than scrolling down to see it

So, as per user request, two changes related to the flatmate quiz were made:

In the Mid-Fi we then realised that the filtering for the search result was missing, so both a sorting and filtering option was added to the page in the Hi-Fi mockup.

The closing of an ad was also simplified and while in the Mid-Fi prototype the user had to go through three steps before being able to remove an ad, in the Hi-Fi 2 separate icons were added respectively for editing and deleting the ad post.

To further increase user engagement and obtain feedback on how the ads are used, an additional survey page was also added:

With my team we decided to revamp the on boarding screen too as it looked rather impersonal:

The onboarding was made more personal by reinforcing the written message with visuals:

Outcome Results & Next Steps

Outcome

The result of my team’s effort is that we achieved to resolve all the initial problems, as requested by the brief:

A mobile-first solution was implemented
Flatmate quiz matching to quicken the current flatmate search
A radical improvement to the current chat functionality
Upload of documentation through a trusted and reliable chat system
A new way to monitoring the progress of an advertisement after posting it into the application

Next Steps

A video calling feature could be added to the current chat.
This additional solution could help with the following:

Prevent the risks of fraud by being able to visually verifying both tenant and property hosts, as well as the property itself
Increase the accessibility to the platform
Improve the communication channels between tenant and property hosts

Lesson Learned

This was a very interesting and challenging project to work on. Being concept design, the brief received was not actually from the company itself and after the first week we discovered that SpareRoom had updated their website, so some of the concepts that I and my team initially incubated for our solution had to be slightly steered.

With my team, I learnt to overcome different opinions and point of views. We proved that it was easy to adapt to a changing situation (outdated brief), and by using an iterative approach we could deliver a viable solution despite this sudden change appeared initially as a major roadblock.

The introduction of the Design Studio workshop was probably the most interesting part of this project. Having the team collaborating creatively and brainstorming new ideas for possible solution was very exciting.

Get in touch

Like what you’ve read and seen so far? You can get in touch with me through my LinkedIn profile or access my portfolio on massimogiraldo.com.

Thank you for your interest!