RoomQuest | Solving the Roommate Problem
Taylor Gersbach | Aelias Mcham | Geoff Tribe
The Opportunity
54% of the world’s population live in urban communities, the average marriage age for men is 29 (up from 26 two decades ago) and for women is 27 (up from 23 in the same time period). Given these trends, city dwellers tend to spend most of their twenties living with roommates. Finding and keeping a good roommate, however, gets harder as more people swarm into cities.
Empathize
To help better understand the user we started conducting interviews. We focused our interviews on millennial-aged men and women. We wanted to find consistent pain points that we could start our design around.
After conducting multiple interviews we found the following pain points and narratives:
- “I’d rather live in a dump with great roommates than in a palace with terrible roommates”
- When looking for a place to live it is hard to tell exactly who you will be living with and if it is a good roommate match
Also, our interviews helped us gather information to create the following persona:
Apple vs Android
As we researched what platform would be best, we looked into statistics for New York City. We found heat maps indicating iPhone vs Android users:
The data pointed us to start designing for iPhone users.
Define
Next, we defined the problem. The roommate situation has many problems that can be addressed to better enhance the user experience, however, we decided to really focus on one singular problem: Better understanding the people you are (going to be) living with.
Many people have had bad roommate experience because they went into a rental agreement with unclear information about their roommates. This disassociation of people not knowing who they are cohabitating can be addressed. We aimed to help solve this problem.
Ideate
Upon our next step, we started coming up with ideas that would help this problem. Some early stages of ideation yielded ideas like: Uber-type ratings for your roommates, a reference system to contact old roommates, the ability to create custom surveys, etc.
During our ideation phase, we stumbled on the 16 Personalities website.
A quick explanation is that you take a quick test and it reveals what type of a person you are based on the answers you’ve given. In addition, it gives you a character/figure that you and others can relate to.
Defining our Idea
We took this idea of identifying with a character and wanted to apply that to our problem. We took what we know about our persona (millennial, tech-savy, frustrated) and started to tweak this concept of characterization. Our intent was to take the characterization of yourself to the next level and make it about your quest for a room, playing on the fantasy genre of the video games millennials grew up playing.
We developed the following:
- Based on an on-boarding process you would take a short quiz to find out what type of character you are. Here is a list of examples:
2. After finding out your character, you could then reference that against other potential roommates.
User story, Site Mapping and Wireframing
Finding our MVP in the User Story:
Once we had this concept, we then started developing a Site Map:
Then developing the following Wire Frames:
Prototyping
After having our ideation and guidelines in place we started Hi-Fi work on our app. We continued with our 16-bit video game look and tinkered with some colors that go well with the early video game theme.
